Lots of rich curatorial questions are posed, and we find ourselves encircled inside a panopticon, meandering through a labyrinthine thought-dance with the Minotaur.
In the past, advanced was a charge towards creative and curatorial acts compromising inspiration, with operations functioning similarly to those of rogue taxidermists, with their dismembering of the muses and nymphs of afflatus so as to suture together chimeras of art, literature, music, theater, Gesamtkunstwerk, and, then later, those of multimedia, intermedia, concept, and even synesthesia with spaces functioning as autopsy theaters, wherein chimeras were layed & flayed for further reconfiguration, acculturation, fossilization, and distribution by the intelligentsia, academia, literati, and gallerists, thereby cluttering and contaminating environment, consciousness, and chronos, restricting creativity within the parameters of documentation, tradition, historicity, and opinion.
How to not separate perception and intake onto discrete tracks and to not filter them into apportioned spaces (e.g. the hushed concert hall and the White Cube).
Rather how do we rewild aesthetic experience?
Our early 20th century non-anthrpopcentric forebears (namely the Italian Crepuscular poets and Futurists) rebelled, promoting “a grammar of animacy” in which all things have agency and need not be human to be respected… or anthropo-servile to be worthy of engagement. It affirmed all things “I’s” and their souls… A boundless “I” and all-permeating soul, nullifying boundaries, ingurgitating surroundings.
Sound art originally was a manifestation of such a movement towards a non-anthropocentric humanism, with sound noising through sites, and bodies, – composing many identities and chance unities into bricolages, made of the debris and moments (relics and tales informing prophecy, future, fate or fail), extracted from a skein of conceptual battlefields and spontaneous junkyards, the portals of which rearray towards original being.
Yet, within the sound art arena, lurks the curatorial temptation to turn the din’drome into an of-noise-scoured knockoff of the concert hall, with sound overlap, rather than being heard as a fortuitous and fateful mingling, being demeaned by the term “bleed.” But bleeding can be towards the good as much as towards the bad.
Bleed is chimeric…powerful multivalent and fraught… not to be tamed… sonic mutilations grafted through sui-genic sound overlaps producing uncharted languages and shrapnelled utterance, exerting either healing or harm.… according witness… with one’s own being’ness, upcoming life, or one’s own telling and told unfolding.
So, how to morph a body/identity-in-pieces towards multiplicitous and polyphonic sonic co-liberations be they ranticles, panifestos, ech-k-oans transcending the hubris and humiliations of human self-significance towards a mounting “nonsensorium”… a smokey biome of asemics and chimeras, offering provocative intangibles, rich in void company, transcendence, and vandalism, providing “nonhuman” agents with a transliterative unfettered placemaking for things, made of sound, mark, or stuff that manifest, from nonspecificity, to nonsensicalness, and then meaninglessness, according to moment and materia.
No doubt, we will continue to argue what IS the sweet spot?
At soundpedro we seek an immersive, interactive and living metabase, by its nature fragmentary and perpetually incomplete, to be enhanced by both human input as well as by the sites’ own volitions, resonating with the tensions of experiences and chance symbols, both borrowed and sui-genic.
At soundpedro sound is allowed to move through space with an agency and instrumentality, rife with the potential impossibility of thoughts conceiving their own thoughts with chimeras cycling, in self-revelation, on a pilgrimage back to inspiration.
The soundpedro site’s lignified querents and metallized humanity share, through immaterial gardenesques and green machinery, a new tangibility wherein technological reach is crested by aesthetic gesture, with non-human energies touching back beyond the immateriality of response and stretching towards the caesura that signs at the unanswered questions’ end.
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THANK YOU
Angels Gate Cultural Center artists, staff and board.
Som Vilaysack, for devising and providing support through artsuZe.
All soundpedro2022 participants.
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