Sound Art and the Ecosophical Object: Some Aesthetico-Ontological Remarks on Machinic Productivity

Abstract

When confronted with the problem of chaos and meaning in the context of the production of subjectivity, sound art emerges time and again as a privileged space for the rearrangement and production of new subjective consistencies. Faced with the processes of increasing subjective homogenization of late capitalism, the sonic imagination, in the centre of an ontological tension between the dissolution of meaning and its structural and phantasmatic redundancy, allows us to carry on “turning over the ground”. We have thus tried to explore sound art as collective enunciation, as a form of excess that goes well beyond the human realm and into the machinic plane of consistency, and we have done this through the prism of a-signifying semiotics. The conclusion we have reached is that of the need for a non-humanist, trans-species, machinic comprehension of sound art and its collective assemblage.