Immanence and Immersion: On the Acoustic Condition in Contemporary Art
Abstract
Immersion is the new orthodoxy. Within the production, curation and critique of sound art, as well as within the broader fields of sound studies and auditory culture, the immersive is routinely celebrated as an experiential quality of sound, the value of which is inherent yet strengthened through dubious metaphysical oppositions to the visual. Yet even within the visual arts an acoustic condition grounded in Marshall McLuhan's metaphorical notion of acoustic space underwrites predispositions towards immersion. This broad conception of an acoustic condition in contemporary art identifies the envelopment of audiences and spectators who no longer perceive from a distance but immanently experience immersive artworks and environments.
Immanence and Immersion takes a critical approach to the figures of immersion and interiority describing an acoustic condition in contemporary art. It is argued that a price paid for this predisposition towards immersion is often the conceptual potency and efficacy of the work undertaken, resulting in arguments that compound the marginalisation and disempowerment of practices and discourses concerned with the sonic. The variously phenomenological, correlational and mystical positions that support the predominance of the immersive are subject to critique before suggesting that a stronger distinction between the often confused concepts of immersion and the immanence might serve as a means of breaking with the figure of immersion and the circle of interiority towards attaining greater conceptual potency and epistemological efficacy within the sonic arts.
... By insisting on a phenomenological reading and state of sound perception, it posits an a-historical and a-social perspective on sound that somehow there should be a special treatment for sound from the other sense modalities. The reduction of a sound away from any surrounding or any context, provides an architecture for immersive aesthetics (Schrimshaw, 2017) where any differentiation or representation is actively removed from the reading of an object. ...
This thesis is about sound and space, and is an exploration of sounds and spaces using Pierre Schaeffer’s sound object theory. It addresses aesthetic and experimental approaches to the exploration of spatial audio and site-specific practices through the intrinsic and extrinsic features of sound objects. These experimental approaches make use of software tools for composition, installation, spatial programming, and sound design, as well as for virtual reality simulation.
The main contribution of the thesis is an exploration of the relationships between sound and space, going beyond the technical issues of the spatialisation paradigm and into issues of place, site, and landscape, as guiding principles for spatial audio practices. The ambisonic soundfield is in this thesis seen as a link between sound objects and spatialisation of sound masses, sharing the same multidimensional space.
The thesis aims to study the various features of sound objects through a multi- dimensional model where we can access main features as well as sub-features, and sub-sub-features, of sound objects. This thesis is divided into four parts, where the first three parts discuss different aspects of the object–structure relationship, and where the last part is a discussion of possible extensions of Schaeffer’s typo-morphological system of identification, classification, and description of sound to encompass spatial features.
The goal of this chapter is to introduce the phenomenological approach to space. For the main objective of our book, which is to phenomenologically describe and define sonic environments, it is vital to distinguish the phenomenological space from a mere sound-space. We have emphasized already in Chap. 2 that it is not sufficient to analyze sonic environments merely as sound-spaces, that is, environments created by a wide range of different sounds. Sonic environments must be rather understood as lived environments, which consequently leads to accounting not only for sounds (and how they constitute sonic space) but also for both acoustic perception and imagination as factors that co-constitute sonic environments. Based on the phenomenological methodology, this chapter focuses, among other things, on the topological significance of the reversible relation between the emergence of an object (e.g., a sound) and its perception. A brief description of this reversibility makes it possible to explain that perception (including audition) can be understood as localization.
In the twentieth century, records and record players were employed as the media and medium of art and music. These generative practices sought to extend the possibilities for sound production, at times ending in the destruction of both vinyl and turntable—what I call cracked media . This paper will revisit cracked media in the twenty-first century, inquiring into how this (re)interest in vinyl has translated into art and music. I will look to contemporary musicians and artists to contrast practices that encapsulate nostalgia with those that seek to communicate ecological and environmental concerns.
It is a matter to ponder that, among the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Islam places the greatest ontotheological distance between the human and the divine. While God is the ground of being Muslim, Islam excludes theophany and prohibits any tangible association between the divine and anything in the material world. God’s mode of manifesting Himself to His creatures has consisted of the most fleeting and discorporate of all means of communication, namely, sound. His words gathered in the Qur’an thus form a non-solid verbal bridge crossing over that unfathomable distance. One could then think that the relationship between the unique Creator and His creatures relies only on the strength of a blind faith founded on a dry, discursive pact. Arguing his “idea of an anthropology of Islam”, Talal Asad did posit that this religion and its culture form “a discursive tradition”. Exclusively focused on the mental modes of knowledge acquisition, this cognitivist verbalist characterization has become a certitude in Islamic studies at large. Yet, it is only a half-truth, for it overlooks the emphatic involvement, in the definition of this tradition of Islam, of the non-linguistic phenomenality of experience that implicates the pre-logical non-cognitive double agency of affect and sensation in the pursuit of divine knowledge. This article expounds this phenomenology of the Qur’an in using an innovative combination of philosophical and literary conceptualities, and in addressing some hermeneutical problems posed by the established Quranic studies.
In recent years, multimodal exhibition practices in which sound appears as a fundamental element have exponentially increased in museums. This phenomenon is based on the recognition that sound is a noteworthy mode to elicit significant museum experiences. Among the various genres, those of sound art and ambiance distinctively convey the idea of social space. In these genres, the spatialization of sound emerges as an outstanding articulator of an idea of space as being socially built according to an understanding that largely transcends Cartesian and Euclidean models. In this study, I discuss the potentialities of sound to construct a space for museum exhibitions based on the idea of space as being socially constructed, as postulated by Lefebvre and Martina Low. The discussion will be supported by the analysis of the exhibitions The Disharmony of Spheres and Stranger than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition .
In this chapter, I explore the ambient basis underlying the technological staging of amplified listening environments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Throughout modern auditory culture, sonic technologies have been industrially designed and used in sonic and audiovisual art and communication to immerse listeners in an interior surrounding world of synthetic sound. I explore how this staging of ambient listening came to constitute a dominant techno-aesthetic ideal and a guiding design principle in the historical development of sound technology—from early monophonic systems to home stereos to cinematic surround sound to current field-based sound systems such as Ambisonics. On this basis, I discuss how ambient affordances and affects are built into the general techno-material framework of modern auditory culture, which subtly but ceaselessly and effectively stimulate listeners to listen more ambiently.KeywordsSurround soundAmplified expansionAudiopositioning
Drawing on Gilles Deleuze, this chapter explores how the ambient environment as an objectless, a-figurative continuum entails a basic aesthetic production of field effects, characterized by the sensation of material consistency, univocal dehierarchization, immanence and ubiquity. The chapter further identifies three basic morphological principles of ambient field effects: the spatial configurations of the sonic field either toward the ground or toward groundlessness, and the temporal a-figurative and a-teleologic production of ambient matter-flow as a form of continuous variation. Finally, I argue that ambient sound in all its variations—beyond established genre conventions, cultural preferences and historical periods—is distinguished by a single and general morpho-material principle expressed in the dynamic combination of repetition and continuity.KeywordsImmanenceUbiquityContinuous variation
Zeitgenössische Musik ist fragwürdige Musik. Sie zieht sich selbst in Zweifel. Eine Philosophie solcher Musik muss diesen Zweifel aufnehmen und fragen, wie Musik heute als Kunst möglich ist. Sie muss die Bedingungen und Problemhintergründe, die begrifflichen Grundlagen und technischen Potenziale der gegenwärtigen Musikproduktion durchdenken. In Auseinandersetzung mit aktuellen Fragen der Komposition und Kunsttheorie erarbeitet Christoph Haffter eine Konzeption des musikalischen Werks, die es an das ästhetische Urteil und an die historischen Tendenzen des Materials bindet. Sie verknüpft auf diese Weise Einsichten der philosophischen Ästhetik im Ausgang von Immanuel Kant mit den kritischen Einwänden des historischen Materialismus in der Nachfolge von Karl Marx und greift darin das Programm der Musikphilosophie Theodor W. Adornos wieder auf. Für diese Verbindung von Musikästhetik und kritischer Reflexion der Gegenwart steht der Begriff eines Musikalischen Materialismus.
In this article I address some questions concerning the emerging conjunction of musical research on improvisation and work in the ‘posthumanities’, in particular the theoretical results of the ‘ontological turn’ in the humanities. Engaging with the work of the composer John Cage, and George E. Lewis’s framing of Cage’s performative indeterminacy as a ‘Eurological’ practice that excludes ‘Afrological’ jazz improvisation, I examine how critical discourse on Cage and his conception of sound is relevant to the improvisation-posthumanities conjunction. After discussing some criticisms of ontological and materialist approaches to sound, I consider the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour, posed as offering an alternative to these approaches. Following an examination of some limitations to ANT based around the themes of critique and abstraction, I draw from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Georgina Born to suggest that work on improvisation and the posthumanities may be fruitful, but must be part of a pluralistic mode of inquiry that does not reject critique and abstraction, as some work in the posthumanities has done.
What does a one hour contemporary orchestral piece by Georg Friedrich Haas have in common with a series of glitch-noise electronic tracks by Pan Sonic? This book proposes that, despite their differences, they share a particular understanding of sound that is found across several quite distinct genres of contemporary art music: the ecstatic-materialist perspective. Sound in the ecstatic-materialist perspective is considered as a material mass or element, unfolding in time, encountered by a listener, for whom the experience of that sound exceeds the purely sonic without becoming entirely divorced from its materiality. It is "material" by virtue of the focus on the texture, consistency, and density of sound; it is "ecstatic" in the etymological sense, that is to say that the experience of this sound involves an instability; an inclination to depart from material appearance, an ephemeral and transitory impulse in the very perception of sound to something beyond – but still related to – it. By examining musical pieces from spectralism to electroacoustic domains, from minimalism to glitch electronica and dubstep, this book identifies the key intrinsic characteristics of this musical perspective. To fully account for this perspective on sonic experience, listener feedback and interviews with composers and performers are also incorporated. Sound in the ecstatic-materialist perspective is the common territory where composers, sound artists, performers, and listeners converge.
This article re-examines the established findings about Umayyad art as a transitional production essentially anchored in the Western and Eastern Late Antique traditions that have inspired it. It argues instead that the Umayyads brought about an aesthetic revolution laying out the foundations of what has become known as “Islamic ornament,” a predominantly aniconic art form. An epistemological shift from art history to critical inquiry allows us to show that, beyond the adaptive borrowing of pre-existing forms, the Umayyads redefined the art’s condition of meaning based on an unprecedented attitude to images and visual discourse informed by Islamic ontotheology and logocentric metaphysics.
This chapter focusses on the second-generation of Italian studios, the S 2F M (Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Firenze) funded by Pietro Grossi in Florence in 1963; the SMET (Studio di Musica Elettronica di Torino) funded in Turin by Enore Zaffiri in 1964, and the Gruppo N.P.S. (Nuove Proposte Sonore) funded in Padova by Teresa Rampazzi and Ennio Chiggio in 1965. Those studios aimed not only at supporting collaboration between composers, musicians and technicians within their framework, but fully open to national and international networks.
I pinpoint differences and analogies between the studios, above all – in the wake of the Western zeitgeist of the late 1960s – the mutual involvement, transfer of expertise, anonymous artworks, relationship of reciprocal hospitality, deliberate lack of authorship (at least at the beginning), and the merging of music with visual art to create new artworks, as ways to break the rules of closed art forms and traditional music.
The chapter also includes brief music analyses and contextualization of the studios’ sound works, as well as discussions of the literature these pioneers produced to corroborate their artistic visions in contrast with the mainstream music scene and music composition trends, and a discussion of the books they read to validate their positions. The radical aesthetical and social positions, in contrast with the desire of these pioneers to introduce the new music into the traditional institutional scene (namely the conservatories of music), is also discussed.
This article evaluates the theoretical and practical grounds of recent debates around Christoph Cox’s realist project of a ‘sonic materialism’ by returning to Gilles Deleuze, a key theoretical resource for Cox. It argues that a close engagement with Deleuze’s work, in fact, challenges many of the precepts of Cox’s sonic materialism, and suggests a rethinking of materialism in the context of music. Turning to some aspects of Deleuze’s work neglected by Cox, the ‘realist’ ontological inquiry Cox affirms is challenged through the ‘onto-ethology’ that Deleuze and Félix Guattari develop in their A Thousand Plateaus, with this diversely constructive theory of relations explicated through musical examples from John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. To conclude, this article suggests that Deleuze can indeed be understood as subscribing to a materialism, but a materialism that is practical rather than doctrinal.
A performance art that focuses on physiological processes rather than on physical movements can be aptly described through the lens of micro-performativity combined with the analytical grid of emersiology, which aims to explain how unconscious and uncontrolled activities of the living human body surface.
This paper demonstrates both the epistemological and aesthetic potential of these concepts by scrutinizing how French, Geneva-based performer Yann Marussich’s ‘immobile’ performance art challenges the very concept of a mesoscopic ‘body’ as a whole, delimited by the borders of its skin. His work dramatizes hardly perceptible micro-movements and physiological flows and offers a projection space where the internal work of the ‘body’ emerges, while stretching the usual perceptive parameters and increasing awareness for spatial micro-phenomena and temporal macro-phenomena—for the performer and the audience alike.
Such art that can be qualified as emersive is the result of what the living body of the artist produces by micro-performative physiological phenomena, such as pain, breathing, blood flow or body posture. Emersion is a movement during which forms appear to spectators on the body’s surface, which externalize the artist’s internal sensations. In order to be activated, and to emerge up to consciousness by producing an aesthetic form, these micro-performative phenomena occur first and foremost by the immersion of the artist's body in constraining displays or devices.
This article explores a relatively novel field of practice, or genre, emerging in the context of museums and exhibitions of popular music and what I will refer to as performatively driven, here discussed and illustrated with examples drawn from particular international exhibitions that I have visited. This genre is comprised of a myriad of strategies used by curators to give substance to their exhibiting narratives that tends to cluster into four essential types – (i) exhibiting sound and music; (ii) dramatic strategies (for current purposes, the example of contrast is considered); (iii) enveloping strategies, and (iv) sound epistemologies – and all of which draw on combinations of multifarious exhibits (material and immaterial). In terms of their signifying potential, my analysis points to these strategies, each of them focused on imparting meaning in an experiential rather than a purely rational sense, as achieving the following ends: conveying notions of popular music as object and artifact; eliciting emotional responses and prompting engagement; valuing museumgoers’ individualities, while also locating them as part of a community (e.g., of music fans, of followers of a particular musical artist, of a particular generation); providing re‐enactment (both by reconstructing scenarios from the past or from live concerts and by activating memories offered of popular music); and conveying knowledge. As these signifying strategies dissolve into the aforementioned meanings in an experiential rather than in a more rational sense, I would suggest they are correspondingly rooted in the concept of performance and therefore propose adding this concept to the typology of concepts presented by Baker et al. (2018).
At the frontiers of our technoculture and experience economy, artist-researchers as catalytic agents become Imagineers and entrepreneurs of themselves. Arts are quantified in expectations of extending forms of communication with people and our environments, by creating humanistic ways of interfacing with machines. Within the experience economy the term ‘immersion’ is overused trending towards VR, which has troubled many researchers and practitioners across disciplines. Drawing on perspectives from performance studies, digital humanities, and human-computer interaction (HCI), this paper reviews the role of XR-enabling technologies, beyond VR, in designing immersive experiences, and their integration into performance practices. It discusses the shift of the artist’s role in imagineering new resources and new ways of working to immerse audiences, and it evaluates this in a postdigital context. It discusses how immersion operates, and critiques components necessary to create affective environments in terms of audience engagement, agency, participation, involvement, presence, embodiment and interaction. The article discusses how performance as a lab can act as a method of inquiry by bringing the anthropological, performative and theatrical perspectives; and the ethics of to testing immersive-enabling technologies and/or experiences within the context of live performances.
In The Soundscape , R. Murray Schafer describes a tone of ‘prime unity’, a tonal centre conditioning an international sonic unconscious. Diverging from the bucolic image of nature readily associated with Schafer’s ethics and aesthetics, this tone is found in the ubiquitous hum of electrical infrastructure and appliances. A utopian potential is ascribed to this tone in Schafer’s writing whereby it constitutes the conditions for a unified international acoustic community of listening subjects.
This article outlines Schafer’s anomalous concept of the tone of prime unity and interrogates the contradictions it introduces into Schafer’s project of utopian soundscape design. Discussion of the correspondence between Schafer and Marshall McLuhan contextualises and identifies the source of Schafer’s concept of the tone of prime unity. Of particular interest is the processes of unconscious auditory influence this concept entails and its problematic relation to the politics of sonic warfare. Through discussion of contemporary artistic practices that engage with these problems, it is argued that the tone of prime unity nonetheless presents an opportunity to shift the focus of Schafer’s project from a telos of divine harmony towards collective self-determination through participatory intervention in the world around us.
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