The Emancipated Listener

Resonance ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-352
Author(s):  
Whitney Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Investigation ◽  
Broad Spectrum ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Ambient Sound ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cognitive Attention ◽  
Evaluative Processes ◽  
Sensus Communis ◽  
Social Phenomenology

An aesthetic controversy regarding the value of conceptual and ambient sound art opens this theoretical investigation into sensation, perception, and understanding. The contrast between valuing sound through language or listening calls on aesthetic philosophy and social phenomenology to transcend existing theories of perception that tend to be rooted in the sense of sight. Extending from the sensus communis, the phenomenology of expanded listening demonstrates that sonic percepts are specified in terms of cognitive attention and temporal adumbration. Judgment and conviction are distinct evaluative processes that draw on cultivated taste and embodied sensation, respectively. An emancipated listener finds enhanced political agency in a sonic sensorium, obviating the mediation of text. Though the history of visual art has tended to value the skillful hand or conceptual mind of the artist, sound art may allow listeners to contribute a broad spectrum of meaning and value through bodies with diverse sensory abilities engaged in expanded discourse.

Acoustic Art Forms in the Age of Recordability

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-206
Author(s):  
Gerald Fiebig
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
Technological Basis ◽  
Sonic Art ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Radio Art

Many theoretical accounts of sound art tend to treat it as a subcategory of either music or visual art. I argue that this dualism prevents many works of sound art from being fully appreciated. My subsequent attempt of finding a basis for a more comprehensive aesthetic of acoustic art forms is helped along by Trevor Wishart’s concept of ‘sonic art’. I follow Wishart’s insight that the status of music was changed by the invention of sound recording and go on to argue that an even more important ontological consequence of recording was the new possibility of storing and manipulating any acoustic event. This media-historic condition, which I refer to as ‘recordability’, spawned three distinct art forms with different degrees of abstraction – electroacoustic music in the tradition of Pierre Schaeffer, gallery-oriented sound art and radiogenic Ars Acustica. Introducing Ars Acustica, or radio art, as a third term provides some perspective on the music/sound art binarism. A brief look at the history of radio art aims at substantiating my claim that all art forms based on recordable sounds can be fruitfully discussed by appreciating their shared technological basis and the multiplicity of their reference systems rather than by subsuming one into another.

Conditions of Visibility

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
Shared Objects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Prejudice ◽  
Historical Past

We often assume that works of visual art are meant to be seen. Yet that assumption may be a modern prejudice. The ancient world - from China to Greece, Rome to Mexico - provides many examples of statues, paintings, and other images that were not intended to be visible. Instead of being displayed, they were hidden, buried, or otherwise obscured. In this third volume in the Visual Conversations in Art & Archaeology series, leading scholars working at the intersection of archaeology and the history of art address the fundamental question of art's visibility. What conditions must be met, what has to be in place, for a work of art to be seen at all? The answer is both historical and methodological; it concerns ancient societies and modern disciplines, and encompasses material circumstances, perceptual capacities, technologies of visualization, protocols of classification, and a great deal more. The emerging field of archaeological art history is uniquely suited to address such questions. Intrinsically comparative, this approach cuts across traditional ethnic, religious, and chronological categories to confront the academic present with the historical past. The goal is to produce a new art history that is at once cosmopolitan in method and global in scope, and in doing so establish new ways of seeing - new conditions of visibility - for shared objects of study.

Reception History and the Interpretation of Revelation

2020 ◽  
pp. 375-393
Author(s):  
Ian Boxall
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
History Of Interpretation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts

The chapter describes the discipline of reception history as the study of the ongoing use, interpretation, and impact of a biblical text. If the history of interpretation has often focused on the ways biblical texts are understood in commentaries and theological writings, reception history also considers how a book was received in spirituality and worship, in music, drama, literature, visual art, and textual criticism. Criteria for selecting and organizing materials useful for reception history are discussed, and there is a review of recent attempts to provide broad overviews of Revelation’s reception history, along with specific examples of the value of the discipline for interpreting Revelation.

scholarly journals The Dispositif of Holography

Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques Desbiens
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Spatial Representation ◽  
Computer Generated Holography ◽  
French Word ◽  
History Of ◽  
Artistic Research

The French word dispositif, applied to visual art, encompasses several components of an artwork, such as the apparatus itself as well as its display conditions and the viewers themselves. In this article, I examine the concept of dispositif in the context of holography and, in particular, synthetic holography (computer-generated holography). This analysis concentrates on the holographic space and its effects on time and colors. A few comparisons with the history of spatial representation allow us to state that the holographic dispositif breaks with the perspective tradition and opens a new field of artistic research and experimentation.

Dataffect: Numerical Epistemology and the Art of Data Sonification

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 29-32
Author(s):  
Mitchell Akiyama
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Affective Responses ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
Simple Representation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Data Sonification

This article examines the history of sonification in sound art, focusing on the role that data play in influencing artistic creation and aesthetic experience. The author discusses sonified data artworks that go beyond the simple representation of information and that offer critiques of what Horkheimer and Adorno described as the dehumanizing notion of equivalence at the heart of the bureaucratic, capitalist economy. Concluding with a discussion of his installation Seismology as Metaphor for Empathy (2012), the author suggests that representing data through sound can engender powerful affective responses to the cold abstraction of information.

Translation

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Bellos
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Broad Spectrum ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Translation Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Basic Distinction ◽  
History Of Translation

This essay seeks to place translation within a broad spectrum of bilingual practice. It shows the basic distinction but also the substantial overlap between oral and written transmission in the ancient and modern worlds, and focuses on issues of trust, prestige and cultural mixing in the history of translation practice. It argues that Roman translation models continue to shape modern approaches to the field. Discussion on why resistance may lie behind the paucity of translations in some languages. Issues raised by the transmission of religious texts have had special impact on the idea of translation, which nonetheless has remained as ‘fuzzy’ in practice in modern times as it was under the Roman Empire.

“He” Had Me at Blue: Color Theory and Visual Art

Leonardo ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (5) ◽  
pp. 460-465
Author(s):  
Barbara L. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
Combustible Mixture ◽  
Color Theory ◽  
Blue Color ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bodily Activity

Schopenhauer and Goethe argued that colors are dangerous: When philosophers speak of colors, they often begin to rant and rave. This essay addresses the confusing and treacherous history of color theory and perception. An overview of philosophers and scientists associated with developing theories leads into a discussion of contemporary perspectives: Taussig’s notion of a “combustible mixture” and “total bodily activity” and Massumi’s idea of an “ingressive activity” are used as turning points in a discussion of Roger Hiorns’s Seizure—an excruciatingly intoxicating installation.

Sound and Wonder

2021 ◽  
pp. 126-140
Author(s):  
Ray Lee
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
The State ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Art Works ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sense Of Wonder

Starting by describing his experience of becoming lost in wonder at the Bakken Museum of Electricity and Life in Minneapolis, in this chapter the artist Ray Lee explores his fascination with the state of wonderment. Referencing his internationally touring sound art works Siren and The Ethometric Museum he reviews the strategies that he has used to attempt to create a sense of wonder, and why this has become both a valuable aspect of his practice and a distinctive part of the audience experience. Throughout the history of science wonder has been a driving force for discovery, yet the sublime, with its suggestion of the spiritual, has more often been used to describe the experience of art. The chapter looks at how wonder creates a sense of creative uncertainty, de Certeau’s ‘rift in time’ or, as Bataille puts it, a state of ‘intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out other than ecstasy’.

Neither Eyewitnesses, Nor Windows to the Past, but Valuable Testimony in its Own Right: Remarks on Iconography, Source Criticism and Ancient Data-processing

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPH UEHLINGER
Keyword(s):  
Data Processing ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Case Examples ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alternative Approaches ◽  
Potential Use

This chapter explores the potential use of visual sources, together with the methods employed for studying them, such as iconography or iconology, for the history of ‘ancient Israel’. It describes the theoretical and conceptual framework, particularly the notion of ‘eyewitnessing’, and considers the method, particularly iconography. The chapter also presents case examples chosen from monuments which are so well known to historians of ancient Israel that they are well suited to illustrate both the pitfalls of more conventional interpretations and the potential of alternative approaches. Before turning to the sources – namely visual evidence that may be related to the history of ancient Israel and Judah – the chapter discusses the state of the art among fellow historians in neighbouring disciplines, including those belonging to the so-called ‘humanities’ (or arts and letters). It also considers visual art and history, the metaphor of legal investigation, the balancing of testimony, and the particular status of an eyewitness.

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