Sound Art Research Articles

Siyakaka Feminism: African Anality and the Politics of Deviance in FAKA's Performance Art Praxis

114 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Jordache A. Ellapen Siyakaka Feminism: African Anality and the Politics of Deviance in FAKA’s Performance Art Praxis In 2015, FAKA, a black femme multimedia art collective, emerged on the South African art scene and immediately drew local and global attention to their use of performance art as a disruptive aesthetic strategy . FAKA consists of two members, Thato Ramaisa and Buyani Duma, who radically reimagine themselves in performance as Fela Gucci and Desire Marea.1 Through performance art and aesthetic practices, they 1. Fela Gucci is a reference both to Fela Kuti, the late Nigerian musician and composer, and the global fashion house Gucci. Fela Kuti is best known for his unapologetic love of sex. In his biography, he states that “the one most important thing in the human being is that life-giving and pleasurable sensation: sexual orgasm.” Quoted in “Sex is Life: That’s What I Believe”: A Look into Fela Kuti’s Biography,” Sowetan Live, January 6, 2015, https:// www.sowetanlive.co.za/good-life/2015-01-06-sex-is-life-thats-what-i-believea -look-into-fela-kutis-biography. Kuti recognized that sexual pleasure is a site of intense regulation and condemnation, especially if it challenges heteronormative ideas of monogamy and reproduction. According to Kuti, sex is more than politics ; sex is life. Sex, as a multisensorial and life-giving experience, is central to Gucci’s and Marea’s personas and FAKA’s practice more broadly. Duma’s use of Gucci is a resignification of power through fashion and aesthetics. Gucci represents the pinnacle of Western fashion aesthetics and beauty, which is out of reach to those who exist on the margins of a society created by the capitalist world order. Duma disrupts these hegemonic meanings of Gucci by demonstrating the power of their creativity to resignify their value and worth in a context where African queers Jordache A. Ellapen 115 disrupt the relationship between Blackness/Africanness and cis-normativity through which the authentic African subject is imagined within postapartheid and postcolonial African state-formations. In the process , FAKA’s objective is to reimagine black masculinity. Their politics of disruption emerges through the positionality of black male femininity organized around the bottom/anus, a site of abjection in heteronormative cultures. FAKA is on a mission to create a living archive through aesthetic and performance practices that include photography, sound art, music videos, DJing, performance art, fashion, literature, and creative writing. They have performed at cultural institutions and stages across Europe, Asia, and South Africa—reimagining and refiguring the meanings of Blackness. FAKA’s objective is to disrupt the heteronormative gaze and the violence of heteropatriarchy in order to destabilize the “cis-hetero-topia of postcolonial Africa.”2 This article examines FAKA’s articulation of a distinctly pan-African queer feminist praxis, which they have labeled Siyakaka feminism. Siyakaka feminism celebrates black, queer, femme, and gender-nonconforming Africans in a cis-normative context that renders them abject. FAKA’s practice emerges from their experiences of displacement in a nation where Blackness is intimately sutured to the heteronormative. do not have access to global trends, brands, or fashions. The name Fela Gucci merges Duma’s African and Western influences and aesthetics while demanding autonomy for African queers who are multiply marginalized . FAKA’s emphasis on fashioning/adorning the body with signifiers of wealth and glamor is best captured by Desire Marea, who writes, “Capitalism gives us access to all the artefacts that can have a different meaning when subverted” Quoted in “FAKA: Making Living Performance Art That Flips the Script on Gender Norms,” Mail and Guardian, September 29, 2016, https://mg.co.za/article/2016-09-29-00-faka-makingliving -performance-art-that-flips-the-script-on-gender-norms. This is also their way to resist the commodification of their bodies and identities. Duma’s pseudonym Desire Marea is a reflection of their desire for a better life, one where black queers can exist truthfully and authentically without the threat of violence. It is also important to note that the boundaries between Ramaisa and Duma and their performance characters Marea and Gucci have become blurred, to the...

Review topography of sound art

Austrian artist and director of ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, Peter Weibel (Odessa, 1944), curates a book/catalogue of the mythical exhibition Sound Art, Sound as Medium of Art, that took place between March 2012 and February 2013 in Karlsruhe, with nearly one thousand images of sound art pieces. Along with a very detailed historical trace of sound as a form of art, the book contains different texts and essays about sound and its history written by renowned and iconic figures in art all articulated in five main sections. A very im-portant work for any artist or amateur interested in sound and music.

RagAlive: Neelambari

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2020.34 | Issue 6 | May 2021 Charulatha Mani Abstract Confronting a pressing need for newer approaches to reimagining traditional musics, RagAlive: Neelambari is a stratified soundscape that is rigorous in theoretical underpinnings and compositional strategies, relevant to fields of poetry, literature and sound art, and makes a significant contribution to the fields of intercultural composition, and music and emotion as envisaged through a practice-based resea

Audibility, visibility and social inclusion through geo-locative sound art

In this article, I will explore the role of field recordings that emerge from the culturally characteristic soundscapes of different communities and the narratives of the people that comprise them. These soundscapes will be hereafter called socialscapes, and I will outline the different ways in which they can be combined with geo-locative sound artworks as a genre of political art and act, functioning as a means of endorsing the politics of inclusion and empowerment within the wider context of activist and political art. The target of such politics is to promote visibility – here audibility – for communities, minorities and other marginalized social groups, such as refugees, immigrants, and other socially excluded groups that are denied involvement in social, political, cultural and economic life, or in educational activities, or are deprived of citizenship due to their ethnicity, age, class, and cognitive, psychological and physical diversities.The sound art forms that will be studied here are mainly the geo-locative artworks, whose sound materials are extracted from the field to be repositioned onto the map through GPS technologies, geo-locative platforms, locative media, and site-specific methods, though the latter is not necessary. Geo-locative platforms and locative artworks use the map of specific areas as a board to attach, inscribe and assign audio or visual material onto them. This procedure is made possible through browser-based platforms such as Echoes, GeoComposer and CGeomap. After the assignment and attachment of the material onto the map, the material is freely accessible to everyone via mobile applications. The case study examined here is the work Dwelling Stories by the artistic team Akoo.o, which explores the dislocation and everyday life of Greek non-native residents during the refugee crisis and the simultaneous touristification of Athens.

Ces sons qui nous envahissent : field recordings, soundwalks et soundscapes éco-artivistes

This text, resulting from a research-creation on low-intensity noise pollution, defines a theoretical research framework in which different heterogeneous concepts interact around the question of environmental artistic engagement: environmental movement, ecology, anthropocene, ecosophy, aesthetics of engagement, artivism, eco-art, sound art, sound ecology. From this complex state of the art emerge three ethics: the ethics of environmental responsibility, the ethics of sound exploration, and the ethics of artistic sincerity. A second section offers the description of the creation These sounds that invade us, considered as a research methodology in three acts: the anthropophony.org collaborative sound library which archives field recordings considered as unwanted sounds, urban soundwalks to raise awareness of the noises that our ears filter, and the composition of dystopian soundscapes developed from the sounds archived on anthropophony.org.

Tools of Rescue: A Review of Silencio para rescatar: documental sonoro

In this audio documentary, Mexican cultural promoter and sound artist Abraham Chavelas recounts rescue activities in which he took part after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake rattled Mexico on 19 September 2017. Answering a call for help, Chavelas was assigned to a collapsed factory where an unknown number of undocumented Asian and Central American women working as seamstresses were trapped under the rubble. For two days, he aided rescue efforts by using a high-tech microphone to help determine whether or not there was life under piles of concrete, glass and debris. Chavelas used the audio he gathered before the Mexican Marines arrived and prevented untrained emergency workers like himself from helping. Subsequently he organised it to create a cathartic homage to the real heroes of the catastrophe: people, not government officials.

Fora de campo e Campo sonoro em Cinema

Usually associated with the practice of cinema, offscreen is understood as everything and what is not contained in the field of cinema, in the plane of image and sound. This conference addresses the issue, placing the field and the field out of the image creation and its relation to what the plan entails and obliterates, in the same way as theatre space, the existence of another space that is filmic. In the same way, the sound field installs itself as the offscreen, to where it is sent what is not in the field. The sound construction, far from replicating the field of the image, establishes the possibility of the film being composed, in fact, by two films. The absence of sound in silent films would have its adherents in the totalizing idea of the art of moving images. However, offscreen was a real need to occupy this field. With the advent of sound, the transformations of silent cinema into sound cinema, established the possibility of a new cinematographic art, in fact two arts: silent cinema and sound cinema. The characteristics of both are not complementary, but rather simultaneous. That means a true relationship between the need of to show everything in field and to reinforce the idea that the field doesn’t exclude the offscreen. Cinema is a sound art, like music and theatre. Like them, cinema founds its nature in the replica of the human: the voice, the sound production, the silence. Like the theatre, cinema makes use of two organs for its reception and for its creation: the eye and the ear. In this way, the cinema works the look more than the see and works more listening than hear.

O Grande Som

Ensaio composto por uma partitura visual, criada para a arte sonora de "O Grande Som", uma obra que trata da associação entre o tupanvírus, um vírus gigante, e a cosmologia tupi à respeito de Tupã. O tupanvírus foi descoberto em um lago de águas alcalinas no MS e, por se hospedar apenas em amebas, sua constituição é associada às formas ancestrais de vida na Terra. O nome do vírus faz referência à Tupã, um importante elemento da cosmologia originária guarani. "O Grande Som" aborda os paradoxos dessa associação por meio da interação entre som e visualidade na intenção de tratar da dimensao invisível do assunto em questão.

Bruno Schulz i muzyka. Exordium

The aim of the article is to answer the question whether there are any connections between Bruno Schulz’s prose and the art of sounds, and how music is present in his prose. It is also the first recognition of this issue in his work, compiling the previous fragmentary opinions of scholars of Schulz’s work on this subject.

Sound acts: towards a sonic pragmatism

ABSTRACT The article makes a case for a pragmatist approach to sound studies. My starting point is the ostensible lack of language for analysing the agentic, creative and expressive aspects of sound outside of domains of speech and music. At the same time, recent aesthetic and technological developments have brought about a plethora of sound practices that defy the apparatuses of musicology and linguistic as much as they do the listening-centred perspectives of sound studies. Discussing six examples of such practices taken from interactive sound art and participatory online cultures, I sketch out possible directions for a sonic pragmatism. In the first part, I put forward three possible premises for such a theory: John Dewey’s aesthetics, G.H. Mead’s ontology of acts, and actor-network theory. In the second part, I discuss three potential categories for the analysis of sound acts – affordance, perspective, and gesture – emphasising, respectively, their material, social, and pragmatic aspects. I argue that a pragmatist epistemology can offer substantial insights into both philosophical and cultural aspects of contemporary soundmaking, suspending the familiar dichotomies of perception and production, subject and object, human and nonhuman.

How to Observe the Inner Space of a Complex Biological System through Speculative Simulation

We present an approach for composition and performance with speculative complex biological systems. This iterative approach engages with both the content and the context of science through generative visual and sound art. We offer a conceptual framing as well as practical exercises, demonstrated in two cases. By distinguishing the system, its representation, and human observer(s), we clarify influences, material artifacts, and sources of tension. In the case of Dismantling, a live performance using a simulation adapted from a model of the acellular slime mold Physarum polycephalum, we explore a shifting locus of agency during the performance between the observer and the representation. In the case of Feed, a visual and sound installation realizing addiction as a multi-scale process, we explore the generative tension of re-use of a representation to engage with different systems. The underlying biological phenomena can be viewed as complex networks with powerful performative agency and multi-scale behaviors.

The Legacy of the Mountain Witch: Yasuko Yokoshi's shuffleyamamba

The contemporary dance production shuffleyamamba by Japan-based dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yasuko Yokoshi takes inspiration from the medieval noh play Yamamba (Mountain Crone). Drawing from the female-centered focus of the play and the complexity of the yamamba image, Yokoshi, in collaboration with American sound artist Gelsey Bell, weaves together a multifaceted work that celebrates the enduring legacies of dance and female performance.

Postcritical Listening: Political affordances in participatory sound art

This article makes an argument for the postcritical treatment of the politics of sound art. Counterpointing an autoethnographic analysis of Kristina Kubisch’sElectrical Walkswith Seth Kim-Cohen’s critical reading of the same work, I show how a critical position detached from the lived experience leaves behind a wealth of meanings necessary to understand the political potential of sound art. This gap, I argue, necessitates a ‘radical empiricist’ approach shifting the focus from the artistic intent to the lived experiences of the audience and the effects sound art may have on their lives. Drawing on autoethnographic and ethnographic accounts of Kaffe Matthews’s sonic bike rides and Benoît MaubreySpeaker Sculptures, as well as Rita Felski’s project of postcritical reading, I develop a theoretical framework for the politics of sound art based around the concept of affordance. The term ‘affordance’ in this context refers to the possibilities of political meaning or political action an artwork offers to the participants without imposing a particular interpretation on them. I finish by discussing three aspects of political affordances in sound art: meaning-making, uses of sound art and access to participation.

From Physical to Spiritual: Defining the practice of embodied sonic meditation

This article narrates my practice-based research in embodied sonic meditation, as a Digital Musical Instrument (DMI) designer, a vocalist, a composer, a media artist and a long-term meditation practitioner. I define the concept of ‘embodied sonic meditation’ in the context of electroacoustic sound art with the augmentation by music technology and human-centred design. I historically connect embodied sonic meditation to its roots in Tibetan Buddhism and several inspiring music compositional practices in the Western world from the second half of the twentieth century. I argue that physicality and spirituality are unified in an inseparable non-duality form, through sound, body and mind. I develop a methodology for embodied sonic meditation practice, built on fifteen design principles based on previous research in DMI design principles, neuroscience research in meditation, Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Theory, and the criteria of efficiency, music subjectivity, affordance, culture constraints and meaning making. I then make reference to three proof-of-concept case studies that use a sensor-augmented body as an instrument to create sound and sonic awareness. I argue that embodied sonic meditation affords an opportunity for sound art to mediate cultures, improve people’s well-being, and better connect people to their inner peace and the outer world.

On Phonosophy

With phonosophy, we are investigating a platform to disembark from the vehicle of the long-travelled logos. The once organic and flowing aspects of Logos (Heraclitus) have all but succumbed to the current scientific, materialistic, mechanistic, quantitative and spatially centric epistemology of the last century – one or all of which perspectives define most of the serious theoretical and critical approaches to organised sound, sound art, music concrète, acousmatic and electroacoustic music in our time. Phonosophy will address that which goes beyond or parallel to the logos, or the logocentric. Adrienne Janus’s discussion of Jean-Luc Nancy’sListeningand the sonic turn looks for conditions of an epistemology based on ‘listening as a mode of attending’ to the resonances of sense, ‘where sense touches upon and resonates with all registers of sensual perception as well as intellectual perception … insofar as they resonate’. Suzanne Guerlac points to Bergson’s theory of real duration (durée réelle) that is the vital energy of animate experience and consciousness as opposed to the entropic energy (thermodynamic) of physics. Together these two overlapping discussions consist of the method (listening/sensing) and field (resonance/duration) of the phonosophic investigation.

AI Technology and Biological Research Use in Cultural Practices

The article is a comprehensive analysis of projects aimed at studying AI technologies and culture interaction. The author examines the specifics and uniqueness of art works created through AI-technologies using examples of projects from “Thought Works Arts Global Research”, “Innovation Laboratory of New Technologies”, “Isolation Foundation” and “IZONE Creative Association”. The article analyzes the principle of selection of materials, algorithmic analysis of data, the interdependence of digital data received from the user’s brain impulses with audiovisual content, the possibility of instant data processing in the process of creating an artistic product. The author explores the principles of tracking brain function and decoding human genetic data, which are used to create art projects. The article assesses the potential that AI possesses and explains the conditions necessary for the implementation of AI-technology in culture. As a result of the study, the author revealed that through algorithmic analysis it is possible to transform digital data into a system of expressive signs of visual and sound arts, to broadcast the received audiovisual content. The author finds out that through these technologies it is possible to create interactive art forms (interactive film, installations, immersive presentations, etc.)

Swamp, Sound, Sign: Reflections on interspecies difference in compositional practice

Soundscape composition and environmental sound art already imply critiques and negotiations of nature/culture divide and human/non-human difference. This article, along with the composition it frames, thinks through a vision of environmental sound art that completes a link between sonic practice and its object. As a project, it navigates human/animal difference through a sonic knowing which is founded on life’s shared constitution in signs. Sounds beyond spoken words, like the signs that dominate non-human life, are foundationally non-symbolic, and the ability of environmental sound art to resemble and evoke networks of icons and indices is in some respects a privileged position of electroacoustic music. The article presents a non-dualistic sonic thinking within the decentred perspective of the environment, which emerges as a plural product of its engagements and participants. A vision for soundscape composition is presented, along with a frame for its interpretation as sonic thought, or phonosophy.

Make a Silence

The Hanoi New Music Festival 2018 was an historic event. It was the largest festival of exploratory forms of new music that has ever been held in Vietnam, and artists from countries across Southeast Asia and Japan came to Hanoi to participate. The film Make a Silence - Musical Dialogues in Asia showcases the diverse, multimedia performances that took place at the Festival, including sound art for theatre and video, underground music and free improvisation. Like the Festival itself, Make a Silence is a sensory feast of musical and visual exploration. Combining vivid artistic images, conversations with musicians and footage of concerts, the film meditates on transnational dialogue in the contemporary music scene in Asia. Artists featured in the film include Otomo Yoshihide (Japan), Trần Thị Kim Ngọc (Vietnam), Jiradej Setabundhu (Thailand), Red Slumber (Vietnam), Siew-Wai Kok (Malaysia), Otto Sidharta (Indonesia) and Yii Kah Hoe (Malaysia).
 The film is based on long-term ethnographic research in Vietnam by the director. It examines how transnational circuits of musical exchange in the new music scenes in Asia intersect with postcolonial politics, thereby challenging the often-presumed hegemony of Euro-American lineages of contemporary music.

Beyond Sound in Sound Art: Society and Politics in the Art of Yasunao Tone and Akio Suzuki

The history of sound art has been a case of displacement and misplacement. It has been displaced due to the nature of the medium – sound, a phenomenon that is heard and felt but not seen. In a visually dominated world like ours, this spells the relegation of the importance of sound and audio sensitivity in a human’s perception, cognition and consciousness. It is misplaced as it is more often categorically subsumed under the other art form, music. Sound art is in fact one of the most ancient of art forms when the name of Greek god of wind, Aeolus, was used to name the Aeolian harp. Sound art has often been defined, in the late 20th century and early 21st century and by academics and critics, as a novel form of art. Once again it is another case of displacement and misplacement. The two case studies which will be discussed in this paper will foreground the social and political contexts of the artists as well as their responses to these socio-­political conditions to demonstrate that sound art, just like any other art forms like paintings, music and theatre, is reflexive of the times of the creators, and more.

Hand/Cup/Stone

This article takes a look at notions of agency as experienced by the author in her sound art practice. Primarily a personal reflection on creative practice rather than a theoretical or scholarly piece, the author reviews difference stages of the compositional process and considers where agency lies - with her as composer, with the objects she manipulates, with the electronics that animate those objects, or with the audience / viewers / participants that ultimately experience the work? Landing ultimately on an idea of the agency of imagination, the article also explores ideas of direct, shared, artificial, prosthetic and relational agency. The case study most consistently referred to is Ficarra's work Piano Bench Variations, which premiered at 1078 Gallery in Chico California in January 2019 as part of the Broken Open collaborative exhibit.