Caleb Kelly (ed.): Sound (2011)

“Sound is one of a series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art.

The ‘sonic turn’ in recent art reflects a wider cultural awareness that sight no longer dominates our perception or understanding of contemporary reality. The background buzz of myriad mechanically reproduced sounds increasingly mediates our lives. Tuning in to this incessant auditory stimulus some of our most influential artists have investigated the corporeal, cultural and political resonance.

In tandem with recent experimental music and technology, art has opened up to hitherto excluded dimensions of noise, silence and the act of listening. Artists working with sound have engaged in new forms of aesthetic encounter with the city and nature, the everyday and cultural otherness, technological effects and psychological states.

New perspectives on sound have generated a wave of scholarship in musicology, cultural studies and the social sciences. But the equally important rise of sound in the arts since 1960 has so far been sparsely documented. This volume is the first sourcebook to provide, through original critical writings and artists’ statements, a genealogy of sonic pathways into the arts; philosophical reflections on the meanings of noise and silence; dialogues between art and music; investigations of the role of listening and acoustic space; and a comprehensive survey of sound works by international artists from the avant-garde era to the present.”

Artists surveyed include Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, Doug Aitken, Maryanne Amacher, Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Kim Cascone, Martin Creed, Paul DeMarinis, Bill Fontana, Kim Gordon, Dan Graham, Ryoji Ikeda, Mike Kelley, Christina Kubisch, Bernhard Leitner, Alvin Lucier, Len Lye, Christian Marclay, Max Neuhaus, Carsten Nicolai, Hermann Nitsch, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Luigi Russolo, Karin Sander, Mieko Shiomi, Michael Snow and Bill Viola.

Writers include Ralph T. Coe, Christoph Cox, Suzanne Delehanty, William Furlong, Liam Gillick, Paul Hegarty, Branden W. Joseph, Douglas Kahn, Dan Lander, W.J.T. Mitchell, Michael Nyman, R. Murray Schafer, Michel Serres, David Toop and Paul Virilio.

Publisher Whitechapel Gallery, London, with MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011
Documents of Contemporary Art series
ISBN 0854881875, 9780854881871
239 pages

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co-publisher

PDF (biographies on pp 224-227 are missing)

John F Cline: Permanent Underground: Radical Sounds and Social Formations in 20th Century American Musicking (2012)

Musical labor entered a new phase of alienation following the advent of recording technology in the late 19th century. Whereas prior to recording musicians had a relatively direct relationship with their audience—the sum of the two groups constituting “musicking”—sound reproduction created a spatial and temporal dislocation between them. Most narratives of American popular music trace out a particular genre formation, and relate it to the culture from whence it emerged. By contrast, this dissertation begins from the point where musicking began to disengage from commodification, both at the level of social formation and of the creation of sound itself. Drawing on anthropologist Pierre Clastres’ notion of “Anti-State” modes of organization and cultural critic Ivan Illich’s concept of “conviviality,” or a human-centered rather than mass productionoriented use of tools—in this case musical instruments both handmade and modified—each chapter of this project tackles a different dimension of the quest for autonomous musicking, or a “permanent underground.” Chapter 1 examines the organizational principles that have run in parallel to the bureaucratic, capitalist manifestation of a “music industry” in the 20th century. Beginning with a critique of either/or fallacy of the opposition posited between “modernism” and “nostalgia,” the reminder of the chapter demonstrates the reconciliation between these two aesthetic and political positions; topics include the seizure of public space by itinerant blues musicians in the rural-industrial prewar South, the self-released recordings of gospel artists after WWII, the formation of experimental jazz collectives in the 1960s, and the relationship between psychedelic music and cults/communes in the 1960s. Chapter 2 critiques the function of genre in musicking as means to a reproducible sonic commodity, and argues for “noise” as an aesthetic intervention that disrupts the saleable nature of music—a political act in itself. Chapter 3 suggests several strategies for achieving “noise.” These include the repurposing of industrial machines as musical instruments, the incorporation of foreign musical traditions, and the use of collage as a formal principle. The final chapter profiles six collectives that have emerged since the late 1960s that adhere to the aesthetic and political values established throughout this dissertation.

Dissertation
Faculty of the Graduate School, The University of Texas at Austin, May 2012
Supervisor: Mark C. Smith
520 pages

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Peter Krapp: Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (2011)

Brings to light the critical role of noise and error in the creative potential of digital culture.

To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new media cultures, he traces a resistance to the heritage of motion studies, ergonomics, and efficiency, showing how creativity is stirred within the networks of digital culture.

Noise Channels offers a fresh look at hypertext and tactical media, tunes into laptop music, and situates the emergent forms of computer gaming and machinima in media history. Krapp analyzes text, image, sound, virtual spaces, and gestures in noisy channels of computer-mediated communication that seek to embrace—rather than overcome—the limitations and misfires of computing. Equally at home with online literature, the visual tactics of hacktivism, the recuperation of glitches in sound art, electronica, and videogames, or machinima as an emerging media practice, he explores distinctions between noise and information, and how games pivot on errors at the human–computer interface.

Grounding the digital humanities in the conditions of possibility of computing culture, Krapp puts forth his insight on the critical role of information in the creative process.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Volume 37 van Electronic Mediations
ISBN 0816676240, 9780816676248
216 pages

publisher
google books

Download (removed on 2012-6-30 upon request of the Digital Assets Coordinator of the University of Minnesota Press)