Art & Technology #21: Using Senses Other than Sight

Nevertheless, sound artist, composer, and writer Robert Worby has proposed three categories of sound art: works that are rooted in music; ones that are related to the visual arts, such as sculpture, installation, performance, or conceptual art; and artworks that emerge from poetry, text, and other language-centered forms of expression. The latter is perhaps best illustrated by the experiments of Lettrism, a French avant-garde movement established by Isidore Isou in the 1940s, which focused, amongst other things, on the vocal effects, rather than the meaning, generated by words and letters. In this essay, only Worby’s second type of sound art, pertaining to the visual arts, will be explored.

American composer, artist, and music theorist John Cage is perhaps the most important avant-garde figure in the development of sound art in the postwar period. Aside from using musical instruments in non-traditional ways, Cage, who was inspired by Marcel Duchamp as well as Zen Buddhism, pioneered the use of chance or indeterminacy as a compositional strategy. He is best known for his 1952 piece 4’33,” a performance in which a pianist sits at the piano but never plays a single note for the duration of four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The musician’s inaction forced the audience to focus on the non-musical sounds that they could hear in the room, such as their own breathing and whispering or the noise transpiring from the streets outside. Rather than being a piece about silence, then, 4’33” opened up music to everyday, environmental, and chance sounds that could not be predetermined by the composer.
The conceptual practices developed in the late 1960s also contributed to the development of sound art as something more than experimental music or radical performance. Sound was, for instance, a key element in the videos and installations of Bruce Nauman, who also created purely audio works of art. Moreover, various exhibitions adopted a thematic focus on sound and its hybridization with the visual arts. For example, the 1970 exhibition “Sound Sculpture As,” organized by Tom Marioni at the now defunct Museum of Conceptual Art (MoCA) in San Francisco, presented nine artists, whose primarily performative works focused on everyday noises and technology, while investigating sound as an embodied medium. The later 1979 exhibition simply titled “Sound” at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1979 also introduced a vast array of artworks investigating sound in relation to sculpture, architecture, the built environment, and space.

Japanese electronic music composer and artist Ryoji Ikeda is yet another contemporary artist, using computers and various other digital technologies to investigate sound in variety of “raw states.” His work often employs frequencies, such as ultrasonic waves, at the very limits of human hearing. His 2011 installation <the transfinite> for the Park Avenue Armory in New York was critically acclaimed for its ability to submerge viewers into a rhythmically charged and hypnotic environment illustrative of synchronized data.

In place since 1994, the hybrid art festival SONAR in Barcelona celebrates music, creativity, and technology and successfully held its 23th event just this June. Such events along with all the contemporary artists just discussed underscore the degree to which sound art is thriving today. Art addressing the auditory senses can now be expected to lead some of the most radical and innovative artistic experiments, while finding new ways for collapsing the boundaries between media. ■ with ARTINPOST