Research Catalogue

Auditory Situation is a concept that drives a series of works in the domain of sound art. An auditory situation can be understood as a fluid frame of contingent juxtapositions and occurrences in the context of navigation through sounds. It is comprised of happenings and chance emergences from transient interaction with everyday sounds leaving traces of complex, nebulous and intermingling ‘Object-disoriented' impressions in sonic perception.

The project examines the complex processes through which everyday sounds are perceived as contours of unfolding and intersecting narratives in the mindful contemplation of an itinerant listener; and how do they trigger streams of cognitive associations as contextual interpretation of the sounds in the thoughts. The outcome of the project includes an artists' book consisting of textual interpretation of sound with poetic connotations.

Can “sound” be “exhibited” at all? Isn’t that a basic fallacy, given the nature of sound? In addressing these fundamental questions from a conceptual leaning, one needs to comprehend sound’s specific problem as a curatorial artifact. In the discourse of sound art curating, instead of the “sound object,” the perspective of the project suggests exploring the cognitive-associative thought processes triggered by the process of listening, drawing lines between the source of sound and the listener’s mind that apprehends it. The curatorial process intends to frame the open-ended experience of various fertile auditory situations exploiting sound’s subjective nature at the listener’s end.

We live in an era of pervasive mobility and (dis)connectivity that triggers perpetual dislocation, where perceptions constantly shift across places to form unsettled geographies, producing meanings that at times are arguably independent from the locative sources. As increasingly migratory being, a wandering urban dweller of today's post-global cities is sensitive to environmental sounds navigating through various urban sites considering them as spatio-temporally evolving but gradually disorienting auditory situations, juxtaposed with real-time spatial information, and memory of another place in another time. The nomadic subject relates to these situations through contemplation, mindfulness and contingent processes informed by the enhanced sense of mobility. ‘Exile and Other Syndromes’ (2015 – 2016) responds to this indisposition of migration, placeless-ness and nomadism – impulses of a contemporary condition that eventually blurs the boundaries between the digital and the corporeal, between local and the global, or between private and enhanced access and freedom of the public domain, helping the nomadic subject to emerge as an elevated, emancipated self. The project intends to examine these contemporary realities manifesting in a responsive, augmented, and intelligent environment incorporating multi-channel sound diffusion, modulated text and audio data visualisation. The work considers mindful aspects of deterritorialized mode of listening, and explores its introspective capacity transcending the barrier of immediate meaning to touch the poetic sensibilities. The première of the working version will take place at CUBE, IEM: Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, Kunstuniversität Graz, 19:00, 19 January 2016.

This exposition examines my recent multi-channel sound composition 'Decomposing Landscape' (2015), inquiring into the complex, nebulous, and evolving relationship between sound and site that is thoroughly challenged in the practice of phonography or field-recording-based sound artworks dealing with environmentally troubled sites. Phonography-based compositions and sound artworks are developed through location-aware listening and field recordings made at specific sites and landscapes. The compositional strategy in these works relies on artistic interventions through the intricate processes of field recording and processing of recognisable environmental sounds using multi-channel spatialisation techniques. The artistic transformation renders these sounds into a blurry area between compositional abstraction and a portrayal of their site-based origins. The question is, how much spatial information is retained and how much abstraction is deployed in these sound artworks? A discussion of this work sheds light on some approaches and a methodology of handling site-specific evidence in sound art production.

As an increasingly migratory being, a wandering listener interacts with various places he/she traverses in fleeting and transitory ways, considering them as spatio-temporally evolving but gradually disorienting auditory situations. Instead of locating the source identities of sounds, the listener may relate to these situations through thought processes generated by means of a subjective perception of the various sonic phenomena occurring at these places. This essay describes an on-going project, “Doors of Nothingness,” that frames and textualizes streams of thought triggered by presence in certain immersive but evanescent auditory situations. Essentially personal and contemplative in nature, the project refers to the pervasive interaction that takes place between the constantly migrating man and his contextual sonic environment beyond sound’s immediately accessible meaning. In the context of describing the project and its methodology, this essay intends to develop a discourse on sound’s problematic relationship to locating its source, arguing that situational sonic phenomena activate thought processes that transcend mere epistemic comprehension of the source identity and involve subjectivity, contemplation, poetics, and the mood of the nomadic listener.

This exposition responds to the current flux of migration and the resulting condition of estrangement. The projects – an augmented book project and a corresponding media artwork – respond to mass migration, hyper-mobility, placeless-ness and nomadism, which are blurring the boundaries between the local and the global, the corporeal and the digital, the private and the public. Through an exploration of the poetic and critical capacities embedded in everyday listening the two projects attempt to shed light on the aesthetics of addressing the notion of exile, alienation and estrangement. The exposition let the viewer/reader engage with the artistic matter; namely, the field recordings and on-site writings - artistic acts of poetic contemplation grounded in a personal experience of the urban alienation, with the aim of movement towards self-understanding and emancipation.

Immersion is a much-used word in the domain of sound-based media arts. It is through immersion that the audiences are often made to engage with the artworks, using technical devices and medial dispositive that are at the intersection of culture and materiality in a post-digital era. In this mode of artistic representation, immersion operates as a context for realizing the production of presence as an illusion of non-mediation (Reiter, Grimshaw et al). The main concern of this proposed article is whether the audience tends to become a passive and non-acting guest within the immersive space often constructed by an authoritarian and technocratic consumer-corporate culture. I will argue in the article that in this mode of non-activity the audience may lose the motivation to question the content and context of the work by falling into a sensual and indulgent mode of experience, therefore allowing the consumerist-corporate powers to take over the free will of the audience (Lukas et al). From the position of a socially and environmentally committed sound artist myself, I will argue for producing a discursive context rather than an immersive one in sound artworks that aim to represent contemporary crisis such as climate change critically engaging with the Anthropocenic conditions. I will examine the possibility to create artworks where the individuality of the audience is carefully considered and taken into account as a crucial parameter. I will discuss a number of my recent works to develop and substantiate the argument.

Contemporary Indian films, in their essentially digitalized realms, incorporate techniques such as the location-based multitrack “sync” recording, and surround sound design that reorder the organization of cinematic sound. These practices contrast with the earlier mono- or stereo formats by reconfiguring the linear construct of a soundtrack to produce a spatially evocative sonic environment that offers the listener a more life-like auditory experience of the fictional site. Using significant examples from post-2000 Indian films, this article shows how earlier practices are being replaced by “sync” sound elements and surround sound mixing with a richly spatial arrangement of site-specific ambience. The article argues that these layers of ambient sounds lead to audiences establishing their embodied experience of presence with the fictional site via auditory spatial cognition and immersion in a cinematic soundscape. By situating contemporary sound production practices within the various trajectories of Indian cinema, this article contributes to the broader field of research examining the key developments and emergent aesthetics in constructing spatial environments for cinema.

The article investigates the mediation of homey ambiences or domestic atmospheres and their relation to the outdoors in film and media productions. The article examines how human mediation impacts the perception of site-specific ambient sounds of the home that are aesthetically deployed as auditory backdrops in films and media artworks. The focus is on examining the processes of reconstructing the site of the home through the reproduction, mediation, and rendering of the relatively closed and private indoor sonic environment and its complex relationship to the public outdoors.

Co-sounding: Towards a Sonorous Land is an artistic research that delves into an Acoustemological unpacking of the landscape, focussing on the site of Amstelpark. The project intends to inculcate a dialogic context within which an intersubjective approach to the perception of land as an equitable habitat of human and non-human lifeforms is developed. This mode of reciprocity and intersubjectivity helps to counteract the nature-culture binary with an ambient and environmental aesthetics in sound arts. Project partners: Zone2Source, international platform for art, nature and technology Educational partners: Honours Lab, ArtEZ University of the Arts Project assistants: Tobias Lintl (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) - design and production support Christoph Kummerer - coding support Bidisha Das (KHM Cologne) - system and engineering support Yann Patrick Martins (IXDM Basel) - coding support

The Agenda Group is a research group based at KMD, connecting artistic practices "with an agenda". The group enables crossover methods rather than media specificity, allowing space for different participants. "An agenda" is here understood as an aspect of socially engaged art practices. This relates to people, narratives and history alike and is about our shared values and contribution to society as artists. The engagement relates to issues outside of the artistic context and investigates how these issues might be mediated and moderated with artistic means. The Agenda Group is open for all kinds of artistic practices, but the focus of the discussions will be on artistic practice "as crucial to both individual and societal change and development" (KMD Strategic Plan). The relationality between art and society is never as simple as it seems and these reflections involves the thinking of intensity in addition to formats, translation and displacement. In this sense the agenda of an artistic project is crucial to the understanding of its implications. The Agenda Group is a pragmatic platform to connect various members of staff at KMD (artistic-researchers, post-docs, PhD’s and maybe even MA-students). The main purpose is to meet regularly, presenting and discussing the artistic research of each of the group members. An internal critical agenda. Research group initiator: Professor Frans Jacobi