<div dir="ltr">
<span></span>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">Hi All, </span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"><br></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">Thanks for inviting me to this discussion group and I’d like to share some of my interests and inquires in/about the proposed topic, hoping to hear your feedback and open up a discussion. </span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"><br></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">First of all, I am not a sound specialist/scholar nor practitioner. As a curator and art historian, I have had a growing interest in sound practices and the related discourses, finding the reception and adoption of contemporary audio practice in the intersection of visual art and so-called media art. Hence, I delimits my research within sound art practice that interfaces with digital media and the viewer/listener’s experience of the corporeal effects of such practice and its social aspects. </span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"><br></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">In this respect, I want to take Ryoji Ikeda’s work as an specific example, addressing the following question. Paris-based Japanese composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda, who was a preeminent figure in glitch microsound and the laptop music at large in the 1990s, as well as an active member of the Japanese experimental intermedia collective Dumb Type (est. 1984 in Kyoto), has expanded the arc of his artistic experimentation from music to visual art. In particular, Ikeda’s site-specific installation of sonic and visual intricacies—such as A (2000– ), a sound installation of pure sine waves; matrix(2000–), a site-specific multi-channel sound installation series; Spectra II (2002– ), a site-specific audiovisual installation—experimented with a new realm of audiovisuality reduced from the “compositional potential of pure electronic data,” revealing the ontological complexity of sound and light that exists in both the informational and material domains. In an analogous way to his music, which deliberately reduces, restrains, and abstracts sound at the micro-level and yet extensively orchestrates sonic intricacies at the macro- level in time and space, Ikeda’s sound-oriented installation turns sonic abstraction into a constantly transforming soundscape, fostering the immersive theatrical quality and stimulating the viewer/hearer’s engagement at the limits of their perception. Thus, Ikeda’s work challenges and also ensures the viewer/listener’s highly sensible experience of being in sonic space rather than its signification effects in the linguistic sense.</span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"><br></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">Here, I find that media theorist and practitioner Mitchell Whitelaw’s discussion of inframedia audio practice provides a firm theoretical ground to support Ikeda’s work as well as many other sound practices that mediate digital computation. According to Whitelaw, inframedia is “stratum below or within the cultural mainlines of the electronic media,” and “in the broadest sense, ecological, and this might be the core of its importance: it shows up the fake immateriality of the electronic media, collapses the clean, evanescent streams of data back into sensible dirt and grit; pulls the media themselves out into the material world, into temporal, kinesthetic and affective experience.” In this context, inframedia audio practice integrates the “sensory and affective textures of a media substrate, rather than media ‘content.’” That is, in the content driven media industry and culture, “changing media technologies, and their administration, discipline, control, and misappropriation, continue to incite commercial, ethical and legislative turmoil. The very idea of ‘content’ reflects its status as a secondary concern; media infrastructure is where the stakes are highest.” Hence, the rich absence of contents in inframedia audio practice opens up a new domain of media aesthetics and media critics, in a way, making media infrastructure—that is opaque, inaccessible, and controlled—audible, “routing it out through the speakers, into the sensorium.”</span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"><br></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">In this respect, possibly taking Ikeda’s work as an example, I want to open up more discussions about contemporary sound practice’s key strategic and political importance in contemporary culture, especially underscoring its exploration of our reality entangled with media infrastructure and data and its as yet unknown dimensions. </span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"><br></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">Reference</span></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue""><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">Mitchell Whitelaw, “Inframedia Audio,” first published in Artlink 21(3) (Sept 2001): 49-52</span></p>
<br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:굴림,sans-serif;font-size:10pt">Joo Yun Lee</font></div><div dir="ltr"><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:굴림,sans-serif;font-size:10pt">Ph.D. Candidate in Art History and Criticism - Contemporary Art and Digital Media, Stony Brook University</font><div><font style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:굴림,sans-serif;font-size:10pt">E-mail: <a href="mailto:jooyun.lee.1@stonybrook.edu" target="_blank">jooyun.lee.1@stonybrook.edu</a> / <a href="mailto:jylovelf@hotmail.com" target="_blank">jylovelf@hotmail.com</a></font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
</div>