Sonic Empowerment: Reframing "atmosphere" through Sonic Urban Design
(2020)
author(s): Nicola Di Croce
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
“Urban atmosphere,” which concerns the intangible features that give “life” to everyday environments, provides an important means of appreciating the self-image and narratives of marginalized towns and localities. This paper posits listening critically to sonic environments as a means of exploring and reframing urban atmosphere. Listening practices with a sound art-oriented approach can empower local inhabitants and municipalities by inspiring the collaborative governance of immaterial commons. Sonic urban design, which converges sound art and planning, is presented as a tool for developing awareness of the “uniqueness” and fragility of urban atmosphere through listening activities and proposed community-based sonic guidelines. The initial outcomes of my participation as an artist in residence during the sound art festival Liminaria 2018 provides a recent example of sonic urban design in practice.
Throws of Dice
(2019)
author(s): Henna-Riikka Halonen
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
My doctoral research project is a speculative spatial construct, an alternative labyrinthic infrastructure that is flexibly built within and as a response to the artworks it houses.
Existing in tension with the framework affecting it, the artworks and the texts leak out from the structure and are performed in and around the physical floorplan. This format renders the configuration of the research project visible and temporary, with the potential to be reformulated and adapted to future contexts. The labyrinthic structure allows the research to go off in different directions, enabling us to consider the multiple perspectives and modes of writing that constitute its story and the complex infrastructures that might support it.
As a strategy for artistic, social and political engagement and a reaction to a contemporary condition in which our claim to the positions we occupy is increasingly simplified, my research project creates a space of thinking, imagination and resistance. By confusing the functionality of language, it aims to make visible the power dynamics and infrastructures shaping our world. The notion of power is two-fold, the research examines, on the one hand, the complexity of human interactions and positions concerning hegemonic power structures and on the other hand, the relationship between the visual and the verbal and experience and affect.
A number of defining characteristics of our contemporary condition are matters of concern; the speed of the networked globalized economy, the control enacted by states and categorization and exclusion of culture. In artistic research (and the networked world as a whole) there is often a tendency to adopt an overarching view which seeks to unify under a single concept a multiplicity of events. However, here the strategy is to do away with the reductive way of doing theory and instead, to dismantle hierarchical relationships between categories. My research project also contributes to the genealogies of participatory practices and to bridge the gap between language and visual art, I am tapping into similarities and differences of a kind of a virtual staging offered by literature, visual art and digital technologies. I draw from literary strategies of speculative fiction, in particular, those of the French Nouveau Roman.
By using chance, paradox (aporia) and uncertainty as guiding principles and as revelatory tools this research endeavours to deconstruct and divert perception and language, emphasizing absurdity and creating sense rather than meaning. More particularly, the research constantly explores its own limits and reflects its involvement with the social and political structures it is addressing to create or anticipate new modes of existence.
This project requires the reader/viewer's active participation, leaving holes or unknowns in the narrative structure that moves through entangled nodes of connections and different temporalities to suggest alternative and expansive forms of viewing and making art and research.
The research uses my installation/performance Eden The Pow(d)er of Fear (2014) as a frame structure, both as a physical blueprint of a labyrinth and as a story. This approach is not intended as a retrospective view towards the work but proposes instead a speculative re-writing and re-scripting of a work that offers new 'portals' to other works and worlds, through other narrative and theoretical threads opening up new perspectives, concerns, times and spaces. The other works embedded in the structure are the moving image works Moderate Manipulations (2012) and Placeholder (2017).
From 'Highbrow Art' to Participatory Culture – A Potential for Change
(2016)
author(s): Barbara Lueneburg
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Through the arts research project TransCoding (funded by the Austrian Science Fund as
PEEK AR 259-G21) we wish to encourage participation in the development of a musical-multimedia show and an audiovisual installation by offering participatory culture via the web 2.0.
Since February 2014, the TransCoding team has built a network of various social media channels around a main hub, the WordPress site what-ifblog.net. Here we introduce our topics of multimedia art and contemporary (art) music, community participation, and the ongoing creation of our show under the categories "Art we love", "You, us and the project", and "Making of", respectively. In a fourth category we choose "identity" as our main topic for the content of the show and the blog. The concept of identity offers a framework for the project that is universally relevant and unites our otherwise diverse international community members.
The blog is our main contact point with our community, currently at more than 1000 members, and affords them the opportunity to participate in our project. Via calls for entries we encourage our visitors to contribute images, sounds, and texts that we incorporate in our artwork. Through our social media channels we invite to speak out, share discourse and take influence on the creation of our artwork, thus empowering our followers to express their own identities and participate in the creative process.
We afford our community members authority in shaping our work and offer them a platform to meet and make their interest clear. As we invite contributors to exercise influence in the joint artwork, we look at change as viewed through the power relationship between artist and community. The (commonly) hierarchic relationship between the artist and audience/followers is being changed into one of permeability and mutual influence.
Consequently we explore not only how the artist as researcher can engender social change, but also how the participating community can do so through their contributions to the project. By delving into the participants' motivations, we learn more about their interests as well as about their reasons for creating and for wanting to be a part of our participatory community. The romantic principle of the individual composer-genius working beyond established rules or external controls is obsolete for us; we investigate the role of the artist within this community
and ask how granting creative influence to our community alters traditional (power) models of artist-audience relation and if the interaction consequently adds meaning to both.
TransCoding is located at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz/Austria.
Contents:
1. Introduction: Introduction to TransCoding-From 'Highbrow Art' to Participatory Culture: what is it about and who is involved?
2. Methodology: Positioning ourselves as researchers and artists in the respective fields and introducing the central artworks and the strategies employed in our research project.
3. Case studies: Detailed investigation on the level and the area in which we grant authority in decision-making to our community. Outline of areas of success and conflict our project yields.
4. Conclusion: Demonstration of how TransCoding engenders social and/or artistic change.
The Incidental Person: Reviewing the Identity of the Urban Acoustic Planner
(2016)
author(s): Sven Anderson
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
At the intersection of the urban and the aural lies a territory that remains largely unplanned and frequently marginalized by more dominant agendas that shape contemporary urban development. This paper explores this territory – as both an experiential and an administrative space – through a two-year public art commission in which I initiated an artist placement for myself within the city council in Dublin Ireland, working in the self-declared position of urban acoustic planner. By stepping away from the centralizing concept of the soundscape and drawing parallels with participatory artworks that lie somewhat outside of the traditional canon of works embodied by contemporary sound studies, this paper seeks to discover the identity of this role at its most open, inclusive, and plural.
At the intersection of the urban and the aural lies a territory that remains largely unplanned and frequently marginalized by more dominant agendas that shape contemporary urban development. This paper explores this territory – as both an experiential and an administrative space – through a two-year public art commission in which I initiated an artist placement for myself within the city council in Dublin Ireland, working in the self-declared position of urban acoustic planner. By stepping away from the centralizing concept of the soundscape and drawing parallels with participatory artworks that lie somewhat outside of the traditional canon of works embodied by contemporary sound studies, this paper seeks to discover the identity of this role at its most open, inclusive, and plural.open exposition comments (0)