Likewise videogames also seemed to exist in an alternate universe with names of the Atari 2600 cartridges were often misspelled with surreal effects. Superman became Suppermen; Spider Fighter became Spider Fitter; and they would have completely unconnected images stuck onto the cartridges. It all felt experimental and interesting. I believe this had an immense influence on how I would start to perceive cultural artifacts. Nothing was sacred or could be considered complete, and sometimes that incompleteness could be more meaningful or profound. Everything was fair game. So I started to make my own edit tapes of audiotapes: bits of pop songs, cut in with bits from radio plays, messing about with recording techniques. When the first gulf war broke out I forgot about it for a bit but I eventually came back to this a few years later while I was studying for my degree in Fine Art.

I started making tapes again but pushed the experiments further and incorporated more of my own ambient recordings into them. I thought I was being quite radical. It was only when I was introduced to William Burroughs’ tape experiments from the ‘60s and ‘70s that I realized how much of this ground had been covered. His arrangements of audio material kicked off my interest in this work as a curatorial process.

I still occasionally make things now, but usually only for specific purposes or as a collaborative activity. My practice developed along lines that are seen as consistent with the kind of things a curator might do, so I prefer to see these activities as curatorial. When making things it’s easier to have a frame that makes more sense to more people.  Most of what I currently do would be classified as coming under the job description of the curator, so even when I make something that might be art I prefer to not call myself an artist. It makes explanations more convoluted than they need to be.

The majority of spaces in which I work are spaces that favour visual art forms. The demand for maximized flat wall spaces in art galleries is not particularly kind to the way sound bounces about. Also the relationship sound art has with technology cannot be overlooked. The aestheticisation of technology; speakers, amps, wires, etc; versus some kind of pure acousmatic, spiritualist manifestation of sound … I am often surprised about how the presence or absence of things in space can end up becoming decisions made by curators or by budgets. I’m not sure this is the best way to go about it.

Obviously sound is less easily contained than images and more difficult for visitors to ignore. This and the time-based nature of sound is part of the problem with participation. It can inherently distance the visitor from any sense of interactivity with regards to the way they may choose to navigate sound work. In your average painting show the visitor has much more freedom to navigate their way around the material. In comparison, sound can become quite authoritarian. This is something I try to avoid as much as possible, often at the risk of appearing abstruse or illogical in how the exhibitions I work on might hang together or where individual works begin and end.

One of the main threats to authorial intention in sound is the problem of exhibiting multiple works, particularly in art galleries. These are spaces created to be able to see things well whether they were purpose-built gallery spaces or converted warehouses, shops or power stations. This makes curating sound works for group exhibitions an ecological exercise, things must become part of a broader composition. There are some works that are, of course, able to do this better than others. Navigating these issues is frequently about how much of the work’s autonomy the artist might be willing to let go of. Sometimes this can be to the point at which the work is reduced to being only a hint of what it could be alone, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. It is good for art to talk to each other, even if this ends up becoming messy. Who wants to be alone?

Headphones are a common retreat to retain some kind of autonomy, but they are alienating devices. Artists who make work specifically for headphones, such as Janet Cardiff or Christina Kubisch, demonstrate how crucial it is for sound artists to be aware of the impact the technology has on the environment of the exhibition. John Cage’s famous silent composition 4’33” reminds us of how the often subliminal noises of the audience are part of the experience. What is the purpose of being in a sound art exhibition if the space around us and the people and objects we share it with are ignored? Works like Cardiff and George Büres-Miller’s The Muriel Lake Incident from 1999 are significant in this respect. The Muriel Lake Incident not only plays the soundtrack of the film the one is watching but also chucks in some exceedingly disconcerting audience noises. Experiencing that work was a really important thing for my understanding of curating sound. I remember someone laughing behind me and turning around with one of those spontaneous smiles that appear in awkward social situations only to find that there was no one there and it was all on the tape. I might just as well have ignored that laugh or made a mental note that I was sharing the gallery with idiots. These different responses to an imagined threat had a huge impact on my thoughts about the use of sound art in a gallery.

I’m also very interested in audio archives and how they are reshaping the kinds of things we might put in art galleries as artistic propositions. I’ve mentioned Burroughs, and have curated a number of exhibitions involving his tape experiments, but I’ve always wanted to do an exhibition that would have, at its center, tape recordings by Andy Warhol. I went to a lecture by the art historian Jean Wainwright, who is an expert on Warhol’s tapes, but when I contacted her afterwards she told me that there’s an embargo on them for at least another 20 years or so. Warhol is a specific case, but there is an interesting apprehension in such things being made public. Time-based materials made in such quantities are expensive for estates to vet. Yet re-evaluating such things now that there is more of an awareness of the potentials of sound as art is a really interesting place to be.

Of course sound art is still regarded as a niche art form and a little bit mischievous. I still regularly come across the preconception that sound artists are ill-disciplined iconoclasts making a noise in a space for quiet contemplation. Also the way people are used to engaging with things in art galleries seems to come more from a visual approach to meaning-making. Art galleries are not just spaces for displaying art, they serve a whole load of other functions for visitors and sound art can get in the way of this. It’s harder to socialize and to teach, for example, when you have to also just listen. To speak about a piece of sound art you often have to turn it off or, as it’s time-based, interrupt a moment that your companion might never get back. But these are not necessarily limits.  It might be more valuable for visitors to an art gallery to be aware of just how complex the experience they are having can be. Sound art seems to be a very good way of exploring this.

Having said that I’m more interested in inter-media projects than projects that are only about sound. Many years ago I spent a lot of time recording the sounds around famous paintings, and they revealed to me things that the visual record alone couldn’t. People make very distinct noises around specific types of visual work. How the visual, the aural, and the tactile work together is more interesting to me than prioritizing only one of these things.

The Internet seems to be an integral battleground in how contemporary artists are articulating their relationship to sound and the relationship of sound to other arts practices. I’m working on an exhibition at IMT Gallery in London with a young Danish sound artist called Lotte Rose Kjær Skau. She comes from both a musical and a sound art background, yet what’s exciting about her work is how visual it is and yet how it still feels fundamentally to be about sound art. I like the fact that it doesn’t necessarily matter. Sound art is a comparatively recent articulation of something people have been doing for a long, long time; it seems a shame to be purifying it into a separate discipline now. Artists like Kjær Skau are beyond that.

By Mark Jackson

The post Beyond the Aural: Mark Jackson on Sound Art appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

There is a deep confusion and uncertainly about what sound art is, and how it is defined. This confusion is the primary challenge of curating sound art from a conceptual angle. In my opinion, the question is whether sound art derives from art’s musical tradition, stems out of the visual arts, or can be posited within new media art practice where it can stand on its own. This is the question that complicates the accommodation of sound art in the mainstream or predominant fine-artistic and curatorial practices at large, therefore demanding a new set of structures and methodologies.

I agree with sound-theorists that sound is less closely tied to the Kantian category of substance than vision, and therefore any attempt to frame sound within an artistic object or artifact poses problems of a philosophical nature. I am developing an idea, which I would like to call “auto-curating.” The concept is built upon the consideration that sound art is inherently perceptual and participatory, and arguably proposes a new set of hypotheses brought on by this loose coinage. I would like to suggest that a given auditory situation within a traditional exhibition or public showcasing of sound art appears to a drifting listener as liquid and amorphous; triggering and driving the aural imagination further away from the intended experience posed in the foreground. Therefore, it is important to create fertile auditory situations where sound can affect and activate a multiplicity of interpretations, experiences, and moods on the listener’s end, rather than trying to rely on a material object or artifact.

I feel that creating the visual experience of a sound art piece is problematic, and it is necessary to overcome sound art’s reliance on purely visual representation. In a gallery context, sound art usually compromises with the visual “prop” to anchor the sonic experience, but that is likely to backfire in the potential artistic dissemination of the work in the long run.

Certain behaviors of sound, benefit from what I call “object-disorientation.” They are offered greater travel, mobility, and the emergence from a background or field of sound as accentuated in the “post-digital” universe of “big data” provided by these contemporary times. Following that, sound art indeed seems less esoteric, because of our newfound comfort with the immaterial world of big data invisibly flowing through the post-digital realm. In this space of constant and itinerant flow, the production and reception of sound art happens with greater mobility, and interactivity leads to its more subjective interpretation, rather than attempting an objective existence as mere artifact.

In the discourse of sound art curating, instead of the “sound object,” it would be interesting to explore the cognitive-associative thought processes triggered by sound, drawing lines between the source of sound and the listener’s mind that apprehends it. In the process we would be framing an experience of various fertile auditory situations; exploiting sound’s subjective nature at the listener’s end. My artistic and curatorial practice with sound art falls within this experimental domain.

By Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

The post Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s Object Disorientation appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Sense of Sound
March 3 – May 25, 2014.
Z33 House of Contemporary Art
Zuivelmarkt 33
Holland
www.z33.be

The post Sense of Sound at Z33 House of Contemporary Art appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

In a certain light, Smolenski’s entire body of work seems to be encapsulated within this project. Having learned a lot from his time working as a student in an influential sound lab in the Fine Arts Academy of Poznan, Smolenski always saw audio and visual art pursuits as being two elements of the same exploration. From Smolenski’s view, sound work seems to be the contemporary zeitgeist in the Polish art scene. More and more visual artists are beginning to express themselves within the realm of audio art, in part stemming from the forward thinking of a scene growing out of the audio culture fostered by sound labs, including the one where Smolenski got his start at the Fine Arts Academy of Ponzan.  It’s an exciting trend and Smolenski finds himself right in the thick of it.

One of the artist’s more exciting current projects is being an elemental member of the band BNNT.

Acting as a duo, Smolenski teams with Daniel Szwed to become two members of a sound-bombing experiment, traveling about performing sonic assaults on improvised public settings, gallery spaces, and musical festivals as BNNT. The project has been ongoing since 2007 and serves as a fitting example of Smolenski’s understanding of art being equal parts audio, visual, and performance; a creative cocktail of expression which the artist sees as integral pieces to the same experiential puzzle. Smolenski’s work seems to present a disdain for making distinctions between audio and visual creations, about this the artist states, “There are no definitions or clear cut distinctions. I try to blur them in search for a total reception…Often the perception of art is limited by habits. I aim at creating a more open experience.”

BNNT’s sound is raucous and dissonant, ominously dark and distorted. Incorporating recorded elements such as political speeches, crowd grumblings, and other sonic disruption to build a sonic output defined by a feeling of unrest and unease, the work as a whole seems very much about the nature of politics both in the subjects approached by their songs and the nature of how they put together performances.

The DIY style of their work is immediately present in their mobile truck stage, guerrilla approach of their often unannounced shows, and outfits styled after balaclava-wearing revolutionaries and other agents of forced change and dissatisfaction. Smolenski’s creation of a baritone electric guitar with a body styled after a hollowed out tomahawk missile adds the finishing touch that points to a need to be taken seriously as a carefully considered art performance bent on change.

The work seems appropriately timed given Smolenski’s ideas about the lack of open minded-ness in the public’s approach to art paired with the state of flux and economic difficulty the European union has undergone as of late.

The venue that seems likely to be the most in need of the change Smolenski and Szwed can provide would probably be the world of art, although it is hard to say in most instances whether politics guides culture or if things actually happen the other way around. We are pulling for the latter. In either case, the next time the BNNT rolls into town we would all do well to bum a ride.

By Matthew Hassell

The post Sonic Weaponry with Smolenski and Szwed appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.