The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art

Sanne Krogh Groth, Holger Schulze, Sanne Krogh Groth, Holger Schulze

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501393112
• eBook ISBN: 9781501338809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art explores and delineates what Sound Art is in the 21st century. Sound artworks today embody the contemporary and transcultural trends towards the post-apocalyptic, a wide sensorial spectrum of sonic imaginaries as well as the decolonization and deinstitutionalization around the making of sound. Within the areas of musicology, art history, and, later, sound studies, Sound Art has evolved at least since the 1980s into a turbulant field of academic critique and aesthetic analysis. Summoning artists, researchers, curators, and critics, this volume takes note of and reflects the most recent shifts and drifts in Sound Art--rooted in sonic histories and implying future trajectories.

Part I

After the Apocalypse

The Desert of the Real as Sound Art

1 The Sonic Aftermath. The Anthropocene and Interdisciplinarity after the Apocalypse

2 Composing Sociality. Toward an Aesthetics of Transition Design

3 Dealing with Disaster. Notes toward a Decolonizing, Aesthetico-Relational Sound Art

4 Vocalizing Dystopian and Utopian Impulses. The End of Eating Everything

1

The Sonic Aftermath

The Anthropocene and Interdisciplinarity after the Apocalypse

Anette Vandsø

Introduction

After the Apocalypse

My eyes are slow to adjust to the low level of lighting, and I stumble into the small, darkened gallery space with my hands in front of me. Under my feet deep, rumbling, creaking vibrations flow from speakers mounted below the platform floor and blend together with a more recognizable, tinkling melody of melting water from the front speakers. The curatorial notes on the wall inform me that these sounds come from calving Arctic glaciers recorded above and below water by the Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard on a field trip to Greenland. Although the installation, Isfald, is not directly a “comment on” climate change (Kirkegaard 2015), the precariousness of the declining Arctic ice, and our role in its disappearance, is an inevitable context as the audience literally hear and feel the ice disappearing around them. However, the fragile condition of the Arctic ice is also contrasted by this overwhelming vertical soundscape’s display of “the flux of nature’s inexorable forces,” using the artist’s own words (Kirkegaard 2015, 97).

Figure 1.1 Jacob Kirkegaard recording the melting ice in Greenland. Documentary photo from the production of Isfald. Photo courtesy of Jacob Kirkegaard.

Kirkegaard’s piece is part of a larger movement of “eco sound art” (Gilmurray 2016), which since the turn of the millennium has been exploring materials and sites connected to the human-induced environmental degradations that are unfolding around us at an unprecedented rate. Not only are the current climate changes unmatched in previous decades and millennia (according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC [Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2018]), but also the extinction of species and local populations across the globe has led biologists to suggest that we are now living through the sixth major mass extinction in the Earth’s history (Ceballos, Ehrlich, and Dirzo 2017). In addition, the foreign substances we produce, such as radioactive material, plastic, and gases, including chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) and greenhouse gases, are not only polluting a small part of what we used to call nature, but also causing uncontrollable ecological upheavals with vertiginous effects on timescales reaching far beyond the few generations our imagination of the future normally includes (Steffen et al. 2015; Waters et al. 2016). These developments make it impossible for us to maintain the conventional distinction between us and nature, or culture and nature, and it seems that we are now part of an “ecology without nature” (Morton 2007) in a post-natural condition (Demos 2016).

In response to such data, in 2000 Nobel Prize winner and expert in the atmosphere’s chemistry Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000) suggested that Earth was entering a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene or “age of Man.” The Anthropocene thesis, which was supported in 2016 by the Anthropocene Working Group (Waters et al. 2016), suggests that the human race has become a geological force capable of altering not only “nature,” but also the Earth’s physical and biological systems in substantial ways that will be evident in the Earth’s strata forever (Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2015).

The new Anthropocene world holds challenges for both science and society, writes Colin Waters et al. (2016), the head of the Anthropocene Working Group. But how does the Anthropocene resonate in the field of sound art? This is the key question in this chapter, which will explore the sonic aftermath to this seemingly apocalyptic deterioration of our environment.

The Sonic Aftermath

Environmental degradations have been a broad cultural concern and thus also a topic in the arts at least since the eco-art movements of the 1960s (Demos 2016, 38–45). The sense of the impact of human activity on the Earth was stressed when climate change started to become a topic of global concern in 1988; when the Kyoto Protocol was ratified in 1997; and, in particular, when the Anthropocene thesis gathered a large interdisciplinary field of scientists, environmental scholars from the humanities, thinkers, cultural institutions and artists in many exhibitions, symposia, publications, and artworks, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s engagement in the Anthropocene theme (2013–). Sound artists and institutions are part of this much larger “swarm work,” as the French anthropologist and philosopher of science Bruno Latour (Thorsen and Vandsø 2017, 66) calls it, because the ecological issues are dealt with by many different disciplines at the same time, often in collaboration. For instance, the 2015 Dutch Sonic Acts Festival, The Geologic Imagination, brought together a group of high-profile sound artists, geologists, biologists, and philosophers to examine how art and science map and document the changes that occur at Earth magnitude and on a geological scale, as documented in the following publication by the same name (Altena, Belina, and Van der Velden 2015). Sonic Acts was also partner in the Dark Ecology research and commissioning project (2014–2016), which had Sonic Acts as a partner together with Kirkenes-based curator Hilde Meth. This project had a similar interdisciplinary approach and also included sound artists such as Jana Winderen, B.J. Nielsen, Esben Sommer, and Signe Lidén.

The sonic aftermath refers, in this context, to the many sound artists and institutions who have grappled in recent decades with what the American professor in humanities and the environment Rob Nixon (2013) calls the “slow violence” done to the Earth by humans. They explore these matters either directly by addressing topics such as sustainability, climate change, or even the Anthropocene thesis; or indirectly by exploring the new precarious ecologies of the Anthropocene, including the melting Arctic ice and the toxic landscapes around the former nuclear power plants in Chernobyl and Fukushima, the fragile biophony (Krause 2013) of the threatened rainforest ecology, or the intricate relationship between humankind and the CO₂-neutralizing plants and trees, with which we so obviously are entangled in this climate-changed world. Often these artworks represent their subject matter via an almost objective, scientific one-to-one presentation of field recordings, or sonification of data, or more laboratory set-ups.

While there may be some hope that technological solutions will solve these huge environmental problems, many prominent thinkers assert that we need art in order to survive on this damaged planet. We need art because the ecological upheavals are not only changing our environments, but also our relation to it. But what is the role of the sound artists in this interdisciplinary “swarm work”? Obviously, these eco-sound artworks draw attention to the grave problems that are already described scientifically. But aside from the mere deictic pointing toward the scientific fields of knowledge that are external to the art world, what is the epistemological potential of these artworks in themselves? Episteme means knowledge, and to claim that art has an epistemological potential is to claim that art does not merely refer to an already given knowledge or insight. Rather the artwork in itself produces new knowledge. When we ask about the epistemological potential, we ask what can we learn or gain from listening to these eco-sound artworks? What is at the core of this sonic aftermath?

These are the questions that this chapter will explore. The chapter falls in two parts. In this first part I will introduce different theories on how sound art can either express our disconnected relation to nature or offer a way of reconciliation. This part will draw mainly on aesthetic theory and the thinking and practices of acoustic ecology from the 1970s and onward, as well as the more commercialized uses of field recordings. The analysis will draw attention to the ways in which field recordings, on the one hand, are regarded as an objective study of our sonic environment or, on the other hand, are culturally understood either as an expression of a pristine nature that now only exists as a fetishized commercial product or as a promise of reconciliation with nature, understood as a holistic unity we can connect with through listening. We see the latter in the tradition of acoustic ecology with its propensity toward deep ecology (Naess 1973).

Using this analysis as a theoretical backdrop, the second part of the chapter will investigate examples of current eco-sound art to explore how the seemingly objective, almost one-to-one presentation of a natural material in these artworks, both expresses our cultural and individual changing relation to nature and pushes the listener toward such changes. In this second part I will argue that both the commercial fetishization of nature as well as deep ecology’s longing toward a reconciliation with our life world is challenged by a more complex constitution, similar to what the British-American eco-critic Timothy Morton calls dark ecology (Morton 2007). The examples of eco-sound art presented in this second part of the chapter have been chosen because, taken together, they raise the most important issues concerning this sonic aftermath. However, they are by no means representative of the entire field, which is vast and encompasses many different works, formats, and themes.

Historical Context: Commercialized Natural Sounds and Deep Ecology

Art and the Impossibility of a Reconciliation with Nature

The notion that art has a epistemological potential in relation to our problematic relation to nature is not new. One key example is the aesthetic theory of the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1909–1969), as formulated in the posthumous publication of Ästhetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory) in 1970. Here Adorno presents his ideas on how art can respond to what he refers to as “the violence done to the surface of the earth” (1997, 64). According to Adorno, our problematic relationship with nature is a result of “progress, deformed by utilitarianism” (64). As a result of the process we have experienced since the Enlightenment, rationalism has relegated nature to a “raw material” (66), and this inherent “rational fallacy” “assumes the attunement of even the extra-human to the human” (71). In consequence, the freedom the subject gained with the Enlightenment led to “the desiccation of everything not totally ruled by the subject,” and in consequence to the unfreedom of the objectified other (62), for instance nature.

Adorno’s thoughts resonate with more contemporary eco-critics who claim that the many ecological disasters prove that the progress that came with modernity also came with a fundamentally problematic relationship between humankind and the world around us: we have simply colonized nature (Demos 2016) to the extent that it now constitutes a problem for us. Many contemporary thinkers conclude that the environmental crisis is, in turn, also a crisis in our basic understanding of the relationship between subject and that which is not the subject, including the relationship between human and animal (Haraway 2016), human and Earth (Spivak 2012), and human and environment (Morton 2007).

Against Mimesis

Even though Adorno regards art to be the antithesis to nature, it is also the place where society’s alienation from (and exploitation of) nature can be realized—where humanity can become aware of that which “rationality has erased from memory” (Adorno 1997, 62). His prescriptive aesthetic theory reveals the way in which this epistemological potential is fulfilled. Art should, according to Adorno, most importantly, not pursue the image of nature, but rather strive for natural beauty. In Adorno’s view, natural beauty is undefinable because its substance relies on an essential indeterminacy that is withdrawn from universal conceptuality (70). We cannot put natural beauty into words or into a formula. Adorno is in consequence skeptical of the mimesis we see in naturalistic art depicting nature. For instance, in Adorno’s view the conventional representation of a beautiful landscape that became so popular in the nineteenth century is problematic because it fails to reveal that this landscape is also cultural, formed, and mediated—not intentionally by an artist, but by history. The hypocrisy is, Adorno explains, most obvious when the bourgeois taste condemns the torn-up industrial landscape that reveals a glimpse of our domination of nature as ugly. As a result, the reconciliation promised by naturalistic images merely cloaks and legitimizes our unreconciled relationship with nature, rendering both naturalistic artwork and visits to famous views or landmarks of natural beauty futile when it comes to realizing our problematic relationship with nature. Nature’s eloquence is damaged by objectivation, to the extent where nature, and in particular its rare silence, has become a mere commodity (69).

I wish to connect Adorno’s thinking to the practices of field recordings of nature in order to broaden the scope of his thinking and thus make it easier to connect it to the practices involved in sound art. Because another way in which nature has indeed been commodified is by recording it, publishing it, and distributing it as an antidote to stress or noise pollution, as we see it in the sound tracks often used for meditation, in new age music or noise machines. One early example of this is the iconic nature recordings of thunderstorms or quiet rain produced by the American field recordist Irv Teibel (1938–2010) in the 1970s, published in the Environments album series (1969–1979) and distributed with the Reader’s Digest Magazine. The popular Environments series was marketed as an antidote to the noisy, stressful sounds of everyday urban life: a silence in the form of the sounds of nature. The alleged “superb realism and pastoral beauty” of these recordings aimed to “neutralize disturbing noises” (Syntonic Research Inc. 1969), as it says on the back cover notes authored by Teibel. This was also how they were perceived and used. For instance, in hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Sound Art. The First 100 Years of an Aggressively Expanding Art Form
• Part I After the Apocalypse. The Desert of the Real as Sound Art
• Part II Journeys across the Grid. Postcolonial Transformations as Sound Art
• Part III Come Closer . . . Intimate Encounters as Sound Art
• Part IV De-Institutionalize! Institutional Critique as Sound Art
• Part V The Sonic Imagination. Sonic Thinking as Sound Art
• Part VI Making Sound. Building Media Instruments as Sound Art
• Notes
• References
• Contributors
• Index
• Copyright