[-empyre-] New Sonic Paths, Welcome to Week Three: Jim Drobnick

[Renate Terese Ferro]

Welcome to Week 3 on -empyre to our monthly discussion New Sonic Paths:  Sound Studies Expanded.  We welcome our weekly guest moderator Jim Drobnick who will orchestrate our discussion "Sound Art, Curating, Technology, Theory with guests,  Darren Copeland,  David Cecchetto, Marc Couroux, Christoph Cox, Kevin deForest, Ryan Alexander Diduck, Paul Dolden, Dave Dyment, Anna Friz, Seth Kim-Cohen, Andra McCartney, John Oswald, Eldritch Priest, Salome Voegelin, Jennifer Fisher, and Lewis Kaye.  Jim has gathered a large group of specialists together and we look forward to a robust week on –empyre.  Jim is familiar face and neighbor who teaches and lives just about four plus hours north of us in Toronto, Canada.  We look forward to his virtual presence on –empyre and look forward to the week.
Biographies:
David Cecchetto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at York University (Toronto). He has published widely, including the monograph Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (2013). As an artist working with sound, David has presented work in Canada, Mexico, Russia, the UK, and the USA. www.davidcecchetto.net<http://www.davidcecchetto.net/> (individual); www.theocculture.net<http://www.theocculture.net/> (collaborative blog); @anticharismatic

Darren Copeland is a Canadian Sound Artist creating work for radio, performance, and installation with a focus on soundscape composition and multichannel spatialization. He has explored both abstract and referential sound materials in his fixed media compositions, and many of these works are published on the empreintes DIGITALes label. He is the Artistic Director of New Adventures in Sound Art, a year-round presenter of sound art at the Artscape Wychwood Barns in Toronto.

Marc Couroux is an inframedial artist, pianistic heresiarch, schizophonic magician, teacher (York University, Visual Arts) and writer of speculative theory-fictions—including a Preemptive Glossary for a Technosonic Control Society. His xenopraxis burroughs into uncharted perceptual aporias, transliminal zones in which objects become processes, surfaces yield to sediment, and extended duration pressures conventions beyond intended function. His work has been exhibited and performed internationally (Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago, Glasgow, London) and published by Manchester University Press. His hyperstitional doppelgänger was famously conjured in eldritch Priest's Boring Formless Nonsense.

Christoph Cox is Professor of Philosophy at Hampshire College and regular visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He is the author of Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (1999), co-editor of Realism Materialism Art (2014), and co-editor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (2004). The recipient of a 2009 Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, Cox is editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine. His writing has appeared in October, Artforum, the Journal of the History of Philosophy, The Wire, the Journal of Visual Culture, Organised Sound, The Review of Metaphysics, and elsewhere. He has curated exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Kitchen, New Langton Arts, and G Fine Art Gallery. Cox is currently completing a conceptual and historical book about sound art, experimental music, and metaphysics.

Kevin Ei-ichi deForest is a visual artist whose practice includes audio and video installation, painting and drawing. His work focuses thematically on the representation of hybrid identity, in particular his Eurasian heritage. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual and Aboriginal Art at Brandon University.

Ryan Alexander Diduck is a doctoral candidate and lecturer on sound culture in the department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. His dissertation research centers on the cultural origins of MIDI, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface.

Paul Dolden began his career as a professional electric guitarist, violinist and cellist. Over the past twenty-five years, he has perfected a unique approach to audio technology by using it as a platform to launch otherwise impossible musical performances. His compositions are characterized by a maximalist aesthetic in which hundreds of digitally recorded instrumental and vocal performances are combined in multiple layers. Described as the “missing link” between jazz and rock and the high-brow concert tradition, critics have called his work “music for the information age, enlisting noise, complexity and beauty in its quest for excess,” one that exemplifies “apocalyptic hyper-modernism.” While his early works employed a unified approach to timbral and harmonic variation, in the 1990s Dolden’s concerns superimposed disparate musical styles in the Resonance Cycle (1992-96). With the Twilight Cycle, Dolden investigates the forbidden fruit of contemporary new music—melody and dance rhythms. The winner of over twenty international awards, Dolden’s music is performed in Europe and North America.

Jim Drobnick is a critic, curator and Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at OCAD University, Toronto. He has published on the visual arts, performance, the senses, and post-media practices in anthologies such as Artist-Curators (2013), Senses and the City (2011) and Art, History and the Senses (2010), and in journals such as Angelaki, Canadian Theatre Review, High Performance, Parachute, and Performance Research. He edited the anthologies Aural Cultures (2004) and The Smell Culture Reader (2006), and recently co-edited special thematic issues of PUBLIC (Civic Spectacle, 2012) and The Senses & Society (Sensory Aesthetics, 2012). In 2012, he co-founded the Journal of Curatorial Studies. He is a co-founder of DisplayCult, a curatorial collaborative (www.displaycult.com).

Dave Dyment is a Toronto-based artist, writer and curator. His work, which often involves sound as medium or subject matter, has been seen in exhibitions across the country. In 2008 he was artist-in-residence at the Glenfiddich Distillery in northern Scotland. Later this year he will participate in the Montreal Biennale. He is the co-editor of the YYZ Book One For Me and One To Share: Artists’ Multiples and Editions, which features his chapter “The Needle and the Damage Done” on the topic of Artists’ Records. He has also curated several exhibitions of record works, and compiled two disks for Mercer Union featuring audio works by Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, Michael Snow, Christian Bok, Cory Arcangel, Martin Creed and many others. His own work can be heard on Aural Cultures (2004) and New Life After Fire (2003), a collaboration with Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. Dyment is represented by MKG127.

Jennifer Fisher’s research focuses on exhibition and display practices, contemporary art, performance, feminist epistemology, affect theory and the aesthetics of the non-visual senses. She is co-editor of special issues of Senses and Society: The Senses and Art (2012) and PUBLIC: Civic Spectacle (2012). Her writings have been featured in such anthologies as The Ashgate Companion to Paranormal Culture (2014), The Senses in Performance (2006), Caught in the Act (2005), and Foodculture (1999), as well as Art Journal, Border/Lines, n-paradoxa and Visual Communication. She is editor of the anthology Technologies of Intuition (2006). She is founding co-editor and Editor of the Journal of Curatorial Studies. (www.displaycult.com<http://www.displaycult.com/>).
Anna Friz is a sound and radio artist who recently completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the department of Sound. Since 1998 Friz has predominantly created self-reflexive radio for broadcast, installation or performance, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. She also creates dynamic, atmospheric sound works for theatre, dance, film, and solo performance that are equally able to reflect upon public media culture or to reveal interior landscapes. She has performed and exhibited widely across Canada and at international venues and festivals such as Third Coast Audio Festival (Chicago), PS 122 (New York), AS220 (Providence), Stanford University (Palo Alto), the International Biennial of Radio (Mexico City), Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music (Belfast), Tesla (Berlin), Art+Communication (Riga), Von Krahl (Tallinn), Ars Electronica (Linz), Digitales (Brussels), Radiophonic 07 (Brussels), Observatori (Valencia), RadiaLX (Lisbon), Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro (Valparaiso), radioCONA (Ljubljana), and others. Friz was a founding member of the research collective L.O.T.: Experiments in Urban Research<http://www.l-o-t.ca/> at York University, Toronto. She currently sits on the board of Skálar Center for Sound Art and Experimental Music<http://skalar.is/> (Iceland).

Lewis Kaye is a Toronto-based sound artist, media sciences researcher, and educator. His work explores the interplay between sound, technology and culture through both critical enquiry and creative practice. His current research interests include the status of audio art archives, and the auralization of "big data." Kaye’s recordings of sound environments have been presented in media installation, audio CD, video and live performance. Major solo works include Crowds ReSpaced (Signalraum Gallery, Munich, 2014) and Through The Vanishing Point, a multi-channel sound installation based on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan (exhibited in Toronto in 2010, and Paris and Berlin in 2011).

Seth Kim-Cohen is, according to Jonathan Sterne, the first art historian in the United States hired expressly to work on sound. Whether that is true or not, Kim-Cohen is an artist and writer whose work locates itself at the nexus of sound and conceptualism. His 2009 book, In The Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, has been widely read and responded to. More recently, Against Ambience, analyzes the proliferation of sound and light exhibitions in New York in the summer of 2013. Kim-Cohen’s artwork has been presented on all but three continents. With his bands Number One Cup and The Fire Show, and as a solo artist, he has released roughly a dozen albums-worth of experimental rock and roll. His novel A Thousand Apparatus (2009-10), was produced and published entirely on Twitter. He was briefly quadriplegic and John Peel once bought him a beer. Seth Kim-Cohen is Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Andra McCartney is an Associate Professor in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Since the mid 1990s, she has been developing an approach to the creation of electroacoustic soundwalk art that integrates audience responses into the creative development of walks and installations. Through a background in ethnomusicology, communication, and cultural studies, she thinks and writes about electroacoustic, sound art and sound recording fields as cultures, considering what kinds of interpretive routines are acceptable within these disciplines, and how aesthetic and professional discourses are established. She is especially interested in questions of gender in relation to sound technologies and has written extensively about Vancouver soundscape composer Hildegard Westerkamp. The In and Out of the Sound Studio research project investigates the working practices of soundmakers from a range of different professions, especially those of women. Her present project, Soundwalking Interactions, focuses on the experiences of audiences with different kinds of soundwalk activities.

John Oswald is best known as the creator of the music genre Plunderphonics, an appropriative form of recording studio creation that he began to develop in the late 1960s. This has got him in trouble with, and also generated invitations from, major record labels and musical icons. Meanwhile, in the 1990s he began, with several commissions from the Kronos Quartet, to compose scores, in what he calls the Rascali Klepitoire, for classical musicians and orchestras, including B9 (2012-13), a half hour condensation of all Beethoven’s Symphonies. He also improvises on the saxophone in various settings, dances, and is a successful visual media artist, best known for the chronophotic series Stillnessence. He’s a Canadian Governor General’s Media Artist Laureate. See: http://www.pfony.com<http://www.pfony.com/>, http://www.6q.com<http://www.6q.com/>, http://www.plunderphonics.com<http://www.plunderphonics.com/>.

Eldritch Priest is an author who writes about sonic culture, experimental aesthetics, and the philosophy of experience. He is a post-doctoral fellow at the Radical Empiricism Workshop at the Université de Montréal and is currently writing a book on parasites, the aesthetics of distraction, habits, and daydreams. Eldritch is also a composer and lives in Toronto.

Salomé Voegelin is an artist and writer engaged in listening and hearing as a socio-political practice of sound. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, Continuum, NY, 2010. Other recent writings include a chapter in the The Multisensory Museum Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space, Alta Mira Press, 2014, ‘Listening to the Stars’ in What Matters Now? (What Can't You Hear?) Noch Publishing, 2013 and 'Ethics of Listening’ in the Journal of Sonic Studies, Vol. 2, 2012. Her essay ‘Sonic Possible Worlds’, is part of the Sound Arts issue of Leonardo Music Journal December 2013, Vol. 23 preceding her second book Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound, which will be published by Bloomsbury in June 2014. Voegelin is a Reader in Sound Arts at the London College of Communication, UAL. www.salomevoegelin.net/<http://www.salomevoegelin.net/> www.soundwords.tumblr.com<http://www.soundwords.tumblr.com/>
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