Pieter Verstraete

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Pieter Verstraete is an independent post-doc researcher based in Berlin and an Honorary University Fellow of the University of Exeter. He is author of numerous works on sound, interactive art, voice, music theatre, as well as post-migration and aesthetic protest in Turkey. His essays have appeared in, among others, Performance Research, Theatre Noise, The Legacy of Opera, Disembodied Voice, Theatre & Performance Design, Jahrbuch Türkisch-Deutsche Studien, Praksis, COM.POST/Department of Public Sound, Sonic Mediations, Performing the Matrix, Theater & Technologie, De Witte Raaf, nY and Courant. He is a co-editor of Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing Ways of Knowing in the Humanities and Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality.

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  • The Secret Theatre Revisited: Eavesdropping on Locative Media Performances (2017) author(s): Pieter Verstraete published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    With the proliferation of the iPod and related audio mobile technologies in our daily experiences, Shuhei Hosokawa’s “The Walkman Effect” (1984) gains new significance. While exploring the locative aspects of these technologies for media art, I elaborate on Hosokawa’s idea of a “secret theatre” by paralleling it to some compelling concepts in audio (culture) studies, such as Michael Bull’s “auditized looking,” Elisabeth Weis’ “écouterism,” Denis Hollier/Jean Paul Sartre’s “auditory gaze,” and Steven Connor’s “modern auditory I.” As case studies, I focus on three performative audio walks that all took place in train stations around 2012-2013: Janet Cardiff’s Alter Bahnhof, Dries Verhoeven’s Niemandsland, and Judith Hoffland’s Like Me. Each in their own right reconfigures the urban experience by means of locative features and interactive relations with their environments. These art works help to see Hosokawa’s “secret theatre” in a new light of highly individualized yet relational aesthetic experiences that open our ears and eyes to an outside social context and reality rather than shut them off.
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