Lucie Vágnerová: Sirens/Cyborgs: Sound Technologies and the Musical Body (2016)

“This dissertation investigates the political stakes of women’s work with sound technologies engaging the body since the 1970s by drawing on frameworks and methodologies from music history, sound studies, feminist theory, performance studies, critical theory, and the history of technology. Although the body has been one of the principal subjects of new musicology since the early 1990s, its role in electronic music is still frequently shortchanged. I argue that the way we hear electro-bodily music has been shaped by extra-musical, often male-controlled contexts. I offer a critique of the gendered and racialized foundations of terminology such as “extended,” “non-human,” and “dis/embodied,” which follows these repertories. In the work of American composers Joan La Barbara, Laurie Anderson, Wendy Carlos, Laetitia Sonami, and Pamela Z, I trace performative interventions in technoscientific paradigms of the late twentieth century.

The voice is perceived as the locus of the musical body and has long been feminized in musical discourse. The first three chapters explore how this discourse is challenged by compositions featuring the processed, broadcast, and synthesized voices of women. I focus on how these works stretch the limits of traditional vocal epistemology and, in turn, engage the bodies of listeners. In the final chapter on musical performance with gesture control, I question the characterization of hand/arm gesture as a “natural” musical interface and return to the voice, now sampled and mapped onto movement. Drawing on Cyborg feminist frameworks which privilege hybridity and multiplicity, I show that the above composers audit the dominant technoscientific imaginary by constructing musical bodies that are never essentially manifested nor completely erased.”

PhD Dissertation
Publisher Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, 2016
Advisor: Ellie M. Hisama
242 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF

Continent. 5(3): Acoustic Infrastructures (2016)

“The street-level sonic cultures, acoustic ecologies and personal interventions available to us have, during this long 20th Century, become proliferated by speakers, microphones, synthesised and recorded playbacks, beeps, buzzes and alarms. Roving gangs of indignant mobile-phone music-listeners disrupt the public transit experience. iPhones chirp out the sound of something called ‘crickets’, creatures many a listener may very well never encounter. Airlines pass on the extravagant levy of ‘noise charges’ to their customers, a kind of psychic and acoustic bandwidth fee. Microwave ovens, automobiles and authoritative ahuman voices chime out an acoustic ecology that is neither ‘natural’ nor ‘cultural’, neither ‘societal’ nor ‘technological’, but something that is a heterogeneous mixture of all of these sources, causes and categories. These are ‘acoustic infrastructures’, and although human-made, they are naturalised by their ubiquity and always-on-ness, along with our allover, everyday, experience of them.” (from the Introduction)

With contributions by Richard Chartier, Adam Basanta, Jacob Gaboury, Brian House, Yujin Jung, Jan Phillip Müller, Shannon Mattern and Jamie Allen, Julie Beth Napolin and Marina Rosenfeld, Byron Peters, dave phillips, Gail Priest, Morten Søndergaard, Mark Peter Wright, Sean Smith, and Meira Asher.

Edited by Jamie Allen, Lital Khaikin, and Isaac Linder
Publisher continent., 31 August 2016
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
ISSN 2159-9920

HTML, PDFs (updated on 2022-06-07)

The Record as Artwork: From Futurism to Conceptual Art (1977) [EN, FR]

Exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with show held at Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas, 4 December 1977 – 15 January 1978; Moore College of Art Gallery, Philadelphia, 3 February – 8 March 1978; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal, 7 September – 22 October 1978; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, no dates listed.

Text by Anne Livet and Germano Celant. Artists include Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Hugo Ball, Jean Dubuffet, Yves Klein, Raoul Hausmann, Jean Tinguely, Allan Kaprow, Billy Kluver, Lawrence Weiner, Eliane Radigue, Jan Dibbets, Joseph Beuys, Dick Raaijmakers, Braco Dimitrijević, Antonio Dias, Sarkis, Michael Snow, Topor, Jack Goldstein, Art & Language, and others. Includes discography, index of record producers, and list of works.

Edited by Germano Celant
Publisher Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1977
121 pages

WorldCat

PDF (27 MB)