Group items tagged

"When presented with visual flashes of a black disk and audible beeps, the number of beeps may dictate how many disks you see. Illusion discovered by Ladan Shams, Yukiyasu Kamitani, and Shinsuke Shimojo."

"As museums continue to search for new ways to attract visitors, recent trends within museum practice have focused on providing audiences with multisensory experiences. Books such as 2014's The Multisensory Museum present preliminary strategies by which museums might help visitors engage with collections using senses beyond the visual. In this article, an overview of the multisensory roots of museum display and an exploration of the shifting definition of 'object' leads to a discussion of Pierre Schaeffer's musical term objet sonore - the 'sound object', which has traditionally stood for recorded sounds on magnetic tape used as source material for electroacoustic musical composition. A problematic term within sound studies, this article proposes a revised definition of 'sound object', shifting it from experimental music into the realm of the author's own experimental curatorial practice of establishing The Museum of Portable Sound, an institution dedicated to the collection and display of sounds as cultural objects. Utilising Brian Kane's critique of Schaeffer, Christoph Cox and Casey O'Callaghan's thoughts on sonic materialism, Dan Novak and Matt Sakakeeny's anthropological approach to sound theory, and art historian Alexander Nagel's thoughts on the origins of art forgery, this article presents a new working definition of the sound object as a museological (rather than a musical) concept."

"Jennie C. Jones  practice mines the territory of Modernism-abstraction and minimalism; experimental jazz; and seminal political and social shifts-to reveal the complex and often parallel legacies of the mid-20th century's social, cultural, and political experimentations.  Jones brings to light the unlikely alliances that emerged between the visual arts and the imprint of jazz, highlighting the way they became and continue to exist as tangible markers of social evolution and political strivings. "

Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) is a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future's reality. This vision and practice derives its facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space. Under a BQF intersectional time orientation, the past and future are not cut off from the present - both dimensions have influence over the whole of our lives, who we are and who we become at any particular point in space-time. Through various writing, music, film, visual art, and creative research projects, BQF Collective also explores personal, cultural, familial, and communal cycles of experience, and solutions for transforming negative cycles into positive ones using artistic and wholistic methods of healing. Our work focuses on recovery, collection, and preservation of communal memories, histories, and stories.

"Sound Garden is a 16 inch high, 15 foot square platform of wood squares that recreates a section of a gymnasium floor, or a high-finish dance floor. The parquet is framed by a three foot wide planter of white pansies in full bloom. Suspended above the platform, in the manner of a public address system, are four out-sized black speakers. The speakers emit a three-phase, four-track audio component of verbal instructions for dance routines, the bouncing of a basketball on the floor of the gymnasium, tap dancing and the swiping of an eraser on a blackboard. The work thus takes the form of a rather peculiar hybrid structure with visual, auditory and olfactory dimensions."

"Based merely on a technological approach, one might think that Surround sound is just the technique of reproducing audio signals in a particular array of speakers that distribute sound around space in order to give a three-dimensional illusion for the ears… Surround is not visual really, is not something we can see. Surround is not just a technique of distributing sound, but the consequences of it. It's a characteristic of sound itself, natural to the sonic phenomenon and responsible of the entire notion of the "auditory field" which is more than simply one dimension of space, but a multi-layered, multi-dimensional representation of sound."

"This year I took part in Audio Game Jam 2. A game jam with the goal to raise awareness of accessibility issues experienced by visually impaired people when playing video games. If you haven't heard of audio games, these are games which are played mostly or solely through audio. There's lots of audio games across many genres like narrative adventures, flight simulators, RPG's, RTS games or even GTA style games."

"Voice Yard is an online space created to encourage people to listen and be heard. Used to perceiving our world mostly visually, we sometimes forget that sound is another important means of perception and communication. Every object reveals itself not only through its shapes and colors, but also through sounds, sometimes even more telling about its essence. We, humans, have always used our voices as an important means of self-expression and communication. There are familiar metaphors revealing its existential importance, such as "inner voice" and "voice of the heart," referring to an intimate "true nature" inherent in this human ability."

"Here's an interesting lecture philosopher Christoph Cox gave recently (January 18) in connection with a sound intervention by Andrea Hornick in the Collection Gallery of Barnes Foundation. The lecture, entitled "A brief history of sound art" explores pretty much what its name suggests, going from historical works and artists to relations between sound and other art forms. The philosopher "traces the history of sound art from the invention of audio recording in the late 19th century to the genre-bending compositions of John Cage to the explosion of sound installation in the 1960s. Cox surveys a range of sonic practices, revealing how they resemble and resist approaches in the visual arts.""

"Quick-what does a brain sound like? Time's up! The answer is, of course, "nothing." If you said "lightning and sparks," though, you're forgiven. Odds are good that every "trip" you've taken inside the brain has featured a CGI image of squiggly gray matter, accompanied by the sizzling sound of electricity. This and other sonic clichés-blood whooshing through veins, organs squishing and pulsing-are as much a part of a certain type of hour-long TV drama as a plot twist before a commercial break. They're also a staple in documentaries, where such sounds accompany visuals depicting smaller dramas, like the journey of a blood cell, or the ravages of puberty."

"This acoustic world is open to everyone, but most of us never enter it. It just seems so counter-intuitive-not to mention a little hokey-to listen to trees. But Haskell does listen, and he describes his experiences with sensuous prose in his enchanting new book The Songs of Trees. A kind of naturalist-poet, Haskell makes a habit of returning to the same places and paying "repeated sensory attention" to them. "I like to sit down and listen, and turn off the apps that come pre-installed in my body," he says. Humans may be a visual species, but "sounds reveals things that are hidden from our eyes because the vibratory energy of the world comes around barriers and through the ground. Through sound, we come to know the place.""

"To engage with the notion of musicality in Agnes Martin's work, Pace Live presented performances by the musician Laraaji and members of the group Gang Gang Dance amid the recent exhibition Agnes Martin: The Distillation of Color in New York. The performances highlighted the ways that the legacies of Martin's distinct visual language and philosophies about art making have touched some of the most innovative musical artists working today."

"Two recent exhibitions by Icelander Jónsi and a current one by Oslo-based American Camille Norment reveal how innovative and impactful these two sound-based artists really are. While they certainly differ, they also have much in common. Both utilize sound - melodic and dissonant, subtle and emphatic - in immersive installations that respond to and also transform architectural spaces. Both are acclaimed musicians and composers; their experience as live performers no doubt influences their artworks. For both, sound in their work is music, or song, and also a primary material - they sculpt with sound. Both artists' works are also palpably soulful: they affect visitors sonically, visually, emotionally, and - very likely - spiritually too."

"Electromagnetic fields are everywhere and this workshop provides the basic tools for sensing the invisible universe that surrounds us by providing sonic, haptic and visual feedback on our bodies. "

" The "Testimonium" series explores waste in different formats. It is made up of three sound and visual works that I created from recordings and photos I made at one of the world's largest landfills, the Dandora dumpsite in Nairobi, Kenya, and at very modern recycling and wastewater facilities in Denmark and Latvia."

"Toussaint-Baptiste's current exhibition, Set It Off, addresses affective and relational possibilities of sound through the perspectives of minimalism and a resistance to predetermined representations of Black American experiences by favoring instead abstract visual and sonic expressions of Blackness."

Eno uses visual art and music to make hospital stays more relaxing for patients. (Good history on this project.)

"As more than a third of the planet's human population has gone into some sort of social restriction…self-isolation, social isolation, physical distancing, quarantine…since those who have the luxury of walls have gone behind them-time has not so much stood still, but became fragmented and blurred. Our schedule markers have gone virtual, or gone away, or are far away.  As artists of various media attempt to capture some essence of this time, it may be found that fragments, notes, moments, and blurs, are what express better our experience. Text, audio, visual-both moving and still, compilations, complications, towards combobulations, if that is what comes. This is a time-capsule archive of finished works, and of fragments, reflecting a fragmented time. Fragments that feel frozen or appropriate as they are, and would then be placed with other fragments to create an unanticipated whole."

"If the Universe is born and no one is present to hear it, does it still make a sound? Well, theoretically, yes. As this video from the US filmmaker John D Boswell (also known as Melodysheep) explores, where a 'thick soup of atoms' is present, sound is possible. Made in collaboration with the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz, this short documentary deploys dramatic CGI visuals, a pulsing score and the voices of prominent scientists to explore the sounds of space - from those humanity has recorded to those we can only speculate about. While ostensibly an interplanetary journey, The Sounds of Space is perhaps most intriguing when viewed as an exploration of the physics of sound, and the science of how we've evolved to receive soundwaves right here on Earth. "

"What might a Raphael sound like, based on the particular colors of its paint? According to artist and musician Yiannis Kranidiotis, similar to the sound one makes from blowing on a bottle or rubbing the rim of a water glass. Examining the relationship between color and sound frequencies, Kranidiotis has recently composed a soundscape for Raphael's "Madonna del Prato" (1505), or "Madonna of the Meadow." His resulting video work, "Ichographs MdelP," visualizes the breaking up of the painting into 10,000 cubic particles that correspond to various sounds, honing in on specific parts of the canvas to explore the different tones of different colors."