Yolande Harris: Scorescapes: On Sound, Environment and Sonic Consciousness (2011)

“Scorescapes investigates how sound mediates our relationship to the environment, and how contemporary multidisciplinary art practices can articulate this relationship. It joins my own artistic practice with a theoretical analysis of the field, highlighting how relationships to the environment drawn through sound are profoundly bound up with technology. Key concepts include: making the inaudible audible; underwater sound and cetacean communication; field recordings and the contextual basis of sound; typologies of listening; the score as relationship; and techno-intuition.

Scorescapes negotiates a role for the artist and composer as a researcher, creating hybrid methods and developing alternative forms of knowledge that heighten personal awareness through direct engagement with sonic environments. Working closely with composers David Dunn, Alvin Lucier and Pauline Oliveros, and with bio-acoustic scientist Michel André, I tested and applied theoretical ideas, generating unexpected artistic research questions and methods. These included the need to distinguish between audification, sonification and visualization processes, the paucity of research on underwater sonic environments and the anthropocentric bias towards environmental sound.” (from the Abstract)

PhD thesis
Academy for Creative and Performing Arts, Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University
Supervisors: Frans de Ruiter, David Dunn, Bob Gilmore
146 pages
via leidenuniv.nl

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Nils Röller: Medientheorie im epistemischen Übergang: Hermann Weyls Philosophie der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaft und Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen im Wechselverhältnis (2000) [German]

Ein “Medium des freien Werdens” – so nennt der Mathematiker Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) im Jahre 1921 das Kontinuum. Diese Bezeichnung ist bildet den Anlaß, die medientheoretische Bedeutung der philosophischen Schriften Hermann Weyls zu untersuchen. Die vorliegende Publikation erarbeitet dabei die Differenzen zwischen den Diskursen Weyls und des Philosophen Ernst Cassirer. Laut Weyl ist das konstruktive Kontinuum, in dem seiner Meinung nach die Physik präparierte Ereignisse ansiedelt, scharf von der anschaulichen Wirklichkeit zu trennen. Er sieht dieses als Produkt des menschlichen Bewußtseins. In seiner “Philosophie der symbolischen Formen” macht Ernst Cassirer deutlich, dass aus seiner Sicht und entgegen Weyls Theorie das konstruktive Kontinuum zusammen mit dem mathematischen Symbolismus eine Brücke zwischen Bewußtsein und Wirklichkeit bildet. Das Wechselverhältnis zwischen dem Mathematiker Weyl und dem Philosophen Cassirer zeigt beispielhafte Formen der Vermittlung zwischen Philosophie und moderner Naturwissenschaft. Weyls Schriften werden vor dem Hintergrund der Rezeptionsgeschichte in der “experimentellen Epistemologieö und der “nomadischen Mathematik” als paradigmatisch für die Medientheorie gedeutet.

Doctoral Thesis
Fakultät Medien, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Advisor: Joseph Vogl
220 pages

more information

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Raoul Vaneigem: The Revolution Of Everyday Life (1967–) [FR, ES, EN]

“The book was, along with Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, one of the most significant works written by members of the Situationist International (1957–1972).

The book takes the field of ‘everyday life’ as the ground upon which communication and participation can occur, or, as is more commonly the case, be perverted and abstracted into pseudo-forms. The author considers that direct, unmediated communication between ‘qualitative subjects’ is the ‘end’ to which human history tends – a state of affairs still frustrated by the perpetuation of capitalist modes of relation and to be “called forward” through the construction of situations. Under these prevailing conditions, people are still manipulated as docile ‘objects’ and without the ‘qualititive richness’ which comes from asserting their irreducible individuality – it is toward creating life lived in the first person that situations must be ‘built’. So to speak, it is the humiliation of being but a ‘thing’ for others that is responsible for all the ills Vaneigem equates with modern city life – isolation, humiliation, mis-communication – and toward creating new roles that flout stereotyped convention that freedom comes.” (Wikipedia)

French edition
Publisher Gallimard, 1967.
Vaneigem’s preface to the first French paperback edition was published by Gallimard in 1992.

English translation was first published in 1983 jointly by Left Bank Books and Rebel Press.
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Publisher Rebel Press, 2001
No copyright claims will be made against publishers of non-profit editions.
ISBN 0946061017, 9780946061013
279 pages

Review: Libero Andreotti (J Architectural Education, 1996).

Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (French, 1967, unpaginated), HTML
Tratado del saber vivir para uso de las jovenes generaciones (Spanish, trans. Javier Urcanibia, 1977/2008)
The Revolution Of Everyday Life (English, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, 1983/2001)