2014 Goldfarb Summer Institute Lecture

Sound is but one physical energy among others. John Cage opened music up to sound, more precisely, Western art music to a world of what he called all-sound; it seems important to keep going and open sounds to energies. From a vernacular base of energies long appealed to by artists and musicians, energies course through structures of poetic images, the workings of photographs, the electrochemistry of the body, telecommunications aspiring to the speed of light, the earth’s atmosphere and the solar-terrestrial interactions underpinning global warming.

Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute of Experimental Arts (NIEA), the University of New South Wales. Until recently, he was Founding Director of Technocultural Studies and Professor at the University of California, Davis. He studies the intersections of history, theory and contemporary practice in the arts, media arts, music, science, technology and ecology, from the late-19th Century to the present, with an emphasis on the traditions of modernism, the avant-garde, and experimentalism. He is author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999), co-editor with Larry Austin of Source: Music of the Avant-garde (University of California Press, 2011), a collection, edited with the art historian Hannah Higgins, of Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundation of Digital Arts (University of California Press, in-press), and most recently an overview of the aesthetics of naturally-occurring electromagnetism in the arts, music and science from the late-19th Century to the present, Earth Sound Earth Signal: In the Nature of Electromagnetism (University of California Press, 2014). 

The 2014 Goldfarb Summer Institute is titled Sonic Praxis in X Actions and takes as its primary interest sound and sound art, especially as it has unfolded in and around the visual arts, its discourses, and institutions during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Themes to be explored in this intensive three-week graduate course include: the challenges sound and sound art pose to “the visual arts” and visual culture more broadly as well as the opportunities emerging out of these; the materialities of sound and the role the latter might play within emergent speculative thought; and modes of intuiting novel political orientations through sonic practices. In addition, the course will consider sound as one means of navigating transdisciplinary vectors that cut across the domains of art, science, and technology. Taking its cue from a range of mid twentieth-century propositions associated with the artistic avant-garde, the course will be structured through a series of on- and off-campus “actions” that will allow students to consider these themes at the seminar table, in the studio, on the street, and in the gallery.