Prosthetics, Aesthetics, Thetics: The Intercessions of Sound, Technics and Bodies
Symposium:
- ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art
- More presentations from ISEA2011:
Session Title:
- The Matter with Media
Presentation Title:
- Prosthetics, Aesthetics, Thetics: The Intercessions of Sound, Technics and Bodies
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Panel: The Matter with Media
There is something that happens in the very moment of a ‘live’ utterance—that is to say an utterance that is simultaneously performed and transmitted—that is often overlooked, invisible, and, in a strange sense, inaudible. When one speaks, as Bernard Stiegler and Jacques Derrida have explored, as a philosopher, for example, or an artist, a politician or a citizen, into a microphone attached to a recording/transmitting apparatus, one’s words, in the very moment of their production, are swept away from their locus—the body out of which they issue—to appear elsewhere. It is the nature of this conjoined disappearance/appearance of the audible trace that this paper will investigate. How is it that, in the moment of its production, a voice, already a reproduction, becomes an artifact that must be (re)assigned to a register of sense, a community of meaning, a material body? Especially when the artifactual appearance of such a trace is plural, massive, and distributed? What one might say may be interpreted, deployed, decried, and possessed in a variety of ways, with immediate, contradistinct, and contesting claims and interests, drawing upon—or manufacturing— the authority of a certain event, person, context or trace. How is it that such conditions as culpability, sincerity, deceit, truth, or responsibility are reattached, via such audible artifacts, to sources which are neither direct nor unproblematic sites? And with what consequences? This presentation will address the material aspects of sound artifacts as evidence: scientific, social, political, artistic. Among the various aspects of technically reproduced sound as evidentiary trace that will be addressed are: the cinematic hors-cadre or off-screen sound; audial spectrality (e,g., hauntings, possessions, ‘phone calls from the dead’); social media, audio environments, music and aesthetic soundwork.