Sonic Thinking Read online

  Sonic Thinking

  thinking|media

  Series Editors

  Bernd Herzogenrath

  Patricia Pisters

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Contributors

  1 sonic thinking—An Introduction Bernd Herzogenrath

  2 Time|Place|Memory: Artistic Research as a Form of Thinking-Through-Media Krien Clevis

  sonic thought i

  Walking into Sound Lasse-Marc Riek

  3 Soundscape as a System and an Auditory Gestalt Sabine Breitsameter

  4 Memories of Memories of Memories of Memories: Remembering and Recording on the Silent Mountain Angus Carlyle

  sonic thought ii

  Thaumaturgical Topography: Place, Sound and Non-Thinking Thomas Köner

  sonic thought iii

  The Sounds of Things Heiner Goebbels

  5 Sonic Thought Christoph Cox

  6 in|human rhythms Bernd Herzogenrath

  7 Sound Without Organs: Inhuman Refrains and the Speculative Potential of a Cosmos-Without-Us Jason Wallin and Jessie Beier

  8 Buzzing off … Toward Sonic Thinking Christoph Lischka

  9 Sound Beyond Nature | Sound Beyond Culture, or: Why is the Prague Golem Mute? Jakob Ullmann

  10 One Dimensional Music Without Context or Meaning Mark Fell

  11 How to Think Sonically? On the Generativity of the Flesh Holger Schulze

  12 Immanent Non-Musicology: Deleuze|Guattari vs. Laruelle Achim Szepanski

  13 Sonic Figure: The Sound of The Black Soft Julia Meier

  14 Images of Thought | Images of Music Adam Harper

  15 Digital Sound, Thought Aden Evens

  sonic thought iv

  Sonotypes Sebastian Scherer

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to express my gratitude to bloomsbury (in particular the wonderful Katie Gallof and Mary Al-Sayed) for giving us and me the opportunity to publish this book, and to all those wonderful people that contributed to this volume—it has been a pleasure! Special thanks go out to Sebastian Scherer, for all the work you have put into this!

  I dedicate this book to Janna and Claudia, and to the memory of Frank.

  Two-and-a-half of the essays in this book had a previous life in online-journals, in slightly different versions:

  Christoph Cox’s essay appeared as slightly different versions in Artpulse 16 (2013) and Realism Materialism Art, ed. Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik (Berlin: Sternberg Press 2015).

  Achim Szepanski’s essay also appeared in a slightly different version in Realism Materialism Art, ed. Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik (Berlin: Sternberg Press 2015).

  A small part of Bernd Herzogenrath’s essay already appeared as “The ‘Weather of Music’: Sounding Nature in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan 2009, 216–32.

  … all republished with kind permission.

  Contributors

  Jessie Beier is a teacher, artist, and independent scholar based in Edmonton, Alberta. Beier completed a Masters Degree in Curriculum Studies in 2014 with the thesis project “Schizophrenizing the Art Encounter: Towards a Politics of Dehabituation.” Beier’s interests in both visual and sonic ecologies have led to a research and writing practice that works to think art, in its many forms, as a power for overturning cliché and dismantling common sense habits of interpretation. Beier has worked in a variety of settings as a researcher, educator, and program developer and currently teaches in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta. In addition to her scholarly work, Beier is also a practising artist and musician, working mainly in video and sound installation. Beier has presented her research locally and nationally, and has published writing in Visual Arts Research (University of Illinois Press), The Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy (Taylor and Francis), and The Alberta Journal of Educational Research (University of Alberta).

  Sabine Breitsameter is an expert on experimental electroacoustic art forms. She has been working since the mid-1980s for German public radio within the field of radio drama and documentary as author, director and dramaturge, and as a festival director and curator for, e.g., Documenta/Kassel, Academy of Arts/Berlin, Ars Electronica/Linz, and ZKM Karlsruhe. As a professor for “Sound and Media Culture” she researches and teaches at Hochschule Darmstadt/Germany since 2006. She co-founded the Master program “Soundstudies” at the University of Arts Berlin, where she worked as a guest professor for Experimental Audiomedia from 2004 to 2008. Her publications include ”Die Ordnung der Klänge“ (Schott International 2010): a new German edition and translation of R. Murray Schafer’s The Tuning of the World, writings on listening culture, audiomedia history, and currently on her research project in progress exploring 3D audio and 360° cinema.

  Angus Carlyle is a researcher at CRiSAP at the University of the Arts, London, where he is Professor of Sound and Landscape. He edited the book Autumn Leaves (2007), co-edited On Listening (2013) and co-wrote In The Field (2013). His art works have included 51° 32′ 6.954″ N/0° 00′ 47.0808″ W (2008), Noli Me Tangere (2009), Some Memories of Bamboo (2009) and Air Pressure (2011–2013), a collaboration with anthropologist Rupert Cox. His new project with Cox, Zawawa (2015–) extends Carlyle’s fascination with the heard world of people and place, memory and presence. In 2016, A Downland Index, a book-length experiment in nature writing was published by uniformbooks and the album In The Shadow of the Silent Mountains, an intersection between text, image and sound, was released by Gruenrekorder.

  www.anguscarlyle.com

  Krien Clevis has been active as an artist, researcher and curator. As a professor in the Arts Faculty Maastricht, she teaches Artistic Research in the Fine Arts department. She is involved in a post-doc project at the Lectureship Autonomy and Public Sphere in the Arts at the same faculty. In Rome she has performed research on the Via Appia, in collaboration with archaeological researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen and the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome (KNIR). She earned a PhD by writing a dissertation, entitled LOCVS. Herinnering en vergankelijkheid in de verbeelding van plaats: van Italische domus naar artistiek environment/LOCVS. Memory and Transience in the Representation of Place: From Italic Domus to Artistic Environment (Amsterdam: Jan de Jong/De Buitenkant 2013). This PhD project was devoted to artistic research of the notion of quality of “place,” through a consideration of archaeological and other debates on place and study of the physical and qualitative features of place, especially in historical sites. As an artist she creates new places of meaning: places caught within a dynamics of change and subject to being overwritten all the time. Major concepts in her research are genius loci, palimpsest and lieux de mémoire. By combining artistic, historical/archaeological and personal exploration of locations, she aims to add new meanings to the multilayered dimension of places.

  Christoph Cox is Professor of Philosophy at Hampshire College and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He is the author of Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics (forthcoming) and Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (California, 1999) and co-editor of Realism Materialism Art (Sternberg 2015) and Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum 2004). The recipient of an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, Cox is editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine. His writing has appeared in October, Artforum, Journal of the History of Philosophy, The Wire, Journal of Visual Culture, Organised Sound, The Review of Metaphysics, and elsewhere. He has curated exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Kitchen, New Langton Arts, the G Fine Art Gallery, and the Brick & Mortar International Video Art Festival.

  Aden Evens is Associate Professor of
English at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. His research and teaching zig-zags across disciplinary lines, drawing on training in music, mathematics, software engineering, and philosophy. His 2005 monograph, Sound Ideas (University of Minnesota Press), takes a phenomenological and technological approach to the study of music, helping to usher in the nascent field of sound studies. His book, Logic of the Digital (Bloomsbury Academic 2015), traces the potentials and pitfalls of digital technologies by examining their underlying technical bases. If there is a piano, Aden will probably play it, which is either delightful or annoying, depending on how far away you are sitting.

  Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield (UK). After studying experimental film and video art at Sheffield City Polytechnic he initially reverted to earlier interests in computational technology, music, and synthetic sound. In 1998 he began a series of critically acclaimed record releases on labels including Mille Plateaux, Line, Editions Mego and Raster Noton. Fell is widely known for combining popular music styles, such as electronica and club musics, with typically academic approaches to computer-based composition with a particular emphasis on algorithmic and mathematical systems. Since his early electronic music pieces Fell’s practice has expanded to include moving image works, sound and light installation, choreography, critical texts and educational projects.

  The diversity and importance of Fell’s practice is reflected in the range and scale of international institutions that have presented his work, which include: Hong Kong National Film archive, The Baltic (Gateshead), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Laboral (XIxon), The Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Royal Festival Hall (London), The Serpentine (London), The Australian Centre For Moving Image, Artists Space (NYC), Issue Project Room (NYC), Corcoran (DC), Curtis R.Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (NY), Lampo/Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (Chicago), Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe), Hanger Biccoca (Milan) and others. Fell’s work is in the collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna) and has also been recognized by ARS Electronica (Linz).

  Heiner Goebbels (born 1952) graduated in sociology and music. The German composer and director has created music theater works and staged concerts, radio works, and compositions for ensemble and for big orchestras (Surrogate Cities). As a composer he collaborates with the finest ensembles, orchestras, and conductors. Since the beginning of the 1990s he composed and directed unique and celebrated music theater works such as Black on White (1996), Max Black (1998), Eislermaterial (1998), Hashirigaki (2000), Landscape with distant relatives (2002), Eraritjaritjaka (2004), Stifters Dinge (2007), Songs of Wars I have seen (2007), I went to the house but did not enter (2008) and When the Mountain changed its clothing (2012), which have been presented at the most important festivals in Europe, South- and North America, Australia and Asia. He created installative works for the Centre Pompidou Paris, MAC Lyon, Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, Documenta Kassel, and others. In the last few years he has directed the rarely staged operas Europeras 1&2 by John Cage (2012), Delusion of the Fury by Harry Partch (2013), and De Materie by Louis Andriessen (2014).

  Heiner Goebbels is Professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies of the Justus Liebig University in Giessen and President of Theatre Academy Hessen and has been awarded with many international record-, radio-, theater- and music-awards, the International Ibsen Award 2012, and with an honorary doctorate by Birmingham City University. From 2012 to 2014 he was artistic director of the “Ruhrtriennale—International Festival of the Arts.” Many CDs were released by ecm-records (two Grammy nominations); publications include Komposition als Inszenierung (2002) and Aesthetics of Absence (2015). Heiner Goebbels lives in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.

  For more information see: www.heinergoebbels.com

  Adam Harper is a musicologist who recently completed his PhD on lo-fi aesthetics at the University of Oxford. He is also a music critic writing for The Wire, The FADER, and others, and is the author of Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making (Zero Books 2011), which argues for a reappraisal of modernist aesthetics and offers an infinitely flexible ontology of music based on variables and information. He has also written pamphlets on the future of music for the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts and, for London publisher Precinct, on underground pop music (Heaven is Real: John Maus and the Truth of Pop) and introduced and supervised a new English edition of a 1916 progressive musical manifesto by Ferruccio Busoni, Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music. He has given talks and seminars at the Darmstadt Summer School of Music, the Institut für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna, and The Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University; he has spoken at the All Tomorrow’s Parties and CTM Berlin festivals, for Subba Cultcha in Brussels and Amsterdam, and for the Guardian Music Weekly Podcast; and has contributed to panel discussions hosted by The Wire, the South Bank Centre, Verso Books, Warwick University and the University of East London.

  Bernd Herzogenrath is professor of American literature and culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany. He is the author of An Art of Desire. Reading Paul Auster (Rodopi 2001), An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach (Dartmouth College Press 2010) and editor of two books on Tod Browning, two books on Edgar G. Ulmer, and two books on Deleuze and Ecology. Other edited collections include The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams (Northeastern UP 2012), Time and History in Deleuze and Serres (Continuum 2012), and, most recently, media|matter (Bloomsbury 2014). At the moment, he is planning a project cinapses: thinking|film that brings together scholars from film studies, philosophy, and the neurosciences (members include Alva Noë and Antonio Damasio). Forthcoming publications include the edited collections The Films of Bill Morrison (Amsterdam University Press), and film as philosophy (University of Minnesota Press).

  Thomas Köner (born 1965 in Bochum, Germany) studied at the Musikhochschule Dortmund and CEM Studio Arnhem. He is a distinctive figure in the fields of contemporary music and multimedia art. For more than three decades his work has been internationally recognized and he excels in all the areas of his artistic activity, receiving awards such as Golden Nica Ars Electronica (Linz), Transmediale Award (Berlin), Best Young Artist at ARCO (Madrid), and many more.

  His familiarity with both the visual and sonic arts resulted in numerous commissions to create music for silent films for the Auditorium du Musée du Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Centre Pompidou, and others. Likewise, he created installations for diverse situations, for example ISEA International Symposium on Electronic Art and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Santiago de Chile, to name but two. His works are part of the collections of significant museums such as Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou Paris, and Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal.

  Thomas Köner is continuing his close relationship with sound art by creating radiophonic works for the national radio in Germany (Deutschlandradio Kultur, WDR Studio Akustische Kunst), while also working as a live performer, composer and producer. His music compositions from the early 1990s, including albums Permafrost, Nunatak, and Teimo, were considered pioneering in the field of minimal electronics and are still in print. Köner’s acclaimed production skills with his more beat-oriented duo partner Porter Ricks, whose album Biokinetics is considered “a classic of techno sound,” resulted in remix commissions for amongst others Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails.

  Christoph Lischka studied Composition, Piano, Musicology, Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics at the Hochschule für Musik (Cologne), University of Cologne, and University of Bonn. He has worked as a programmer, software engineer, research scientist, artist, and university lecturer at several institutions, e.g., Hochschule für Musik in Aix-la-Chapelle (Music Theory), University of Cologne (Musicology), Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Art-related Sciences), and University of the Arts Bremen (Digital Media).

  He was a member of several scientific societies; (co-)organizer
of many national and international conferences and workshops; and has many publications in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Music Theory, Foundations of Cognitive Science, Media Theory, and Philosophy. From 1986 to 1998 he was senior research scientist and group leader at Fraunhofer Research Institute (St. Augustine) in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and robotics. From 1998 to 2005 he worked as a freelancing information architect and web developer, from 2005 to 2007 he was visiting professor at the University of the Arts Bremen (Digital Media, Robotics, Media Theory); and from 2007 to 2009 Professor at the University of the Arts Bremen (Autoactive Systems).

  Since 2010 he is an independent researcher and university lecturer in the field of poietic machines (a continuation of the newly established research in Autoactive Systems), where the focus is primarily on the interplay of philosophy, mathematics, computer sciences, sound art, and “convergent technologies,” particularly robotics and nanobiotechnology. Christoph Lischka lives in Frankfurt am Main (Germany).

  Julia Meier, PhD, is a lecturer and freelance writer who has worked in the field of contemporary art, film, fashion, philosophy, and music in Germany and in the United States. She is the recipient of several academic awards including the PhD fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Meier was a visiting scholar at the Department of Comparative Studies at Stony Brook University, New York, where she conducted her doctoral research on David Lynch and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the logic of sensation. She has published various essays about the work of Gilles Deleuze, Diamanda Galás, Chris Cunningham, and Matthew Barney, among others.