More (in Spanish) about the move from sound to image to sound at mediateletipos.net. More on null66913 at null66913.net and twitter.com/null66913.

Read my story at artpractical.com. Podcast originally posted at badatsports.com.

The essay is part of an issue devoted to sound, which includes an introduction by Tess Thackara (who invited me to contribute), an interview with Paul DeMarinis by Renny Pritikin, a discussion between artists Joshua Churchill and Chris Duncan, Matt Sussman on Infrasound, Liz Glass on the Tape Music Center, an interview with Jacqueline Gordon by Ellen Tani, a profile of Ethan Rose by Bean Gilsdorf, a discussion about the forthcoming Invisible Relics exhibit at Park Life (parklifestore.com, a gallery in the San Francisco neighborhood I have long called home: the Richmond District), and an essay by Aaron Harbour drawing from his experience as a curator and DJ.

For my piece, titled “Sonic Infrastructure,” I use three examples of individuals and organizations whose work in sound art involves providing technology to artists and institutions to realize their ideas. I interviewed Shane Myrbeck (shanemyrbeck.com) about his work at Arup (and his own art) and Barry Threw (barrythrew.com) about his work as a solo developer (which includes developing Oval‘s OvalDNA software, a screenshot of which appears up top) and at Obscura Digital. And I also touched on Scott Snibbe‘s substantial contributions (snibbe.com), such as his work on Björk‘s Biophilia apps.

Read the essay, “Sonic Infrastructure,” at artpractical.com.

The work is titled “dear friends who have died are all talking to me tonight / all at once” and it is credited to Radio Cegeste, which is in fact one Sally Ann McIntyre. McIntyre lives of Dunedin, New Zealand, and Cegeste is her working with a small battery of portable FM radios. The radios, in turn, work in collusion with each other in a small space, in this case in Dunedin gallery, to create a fractured sonic hologram of social activity.

McIntyre is working from a rich theoretical construct, which Radius presents along with the audio on its respective pages at tumblr.com and soundcloud.com. This is an except:

As a site-specific, spectator-less, solo performance, dear friends who have died are all talking to me tonight / all at once re-constructs and re-imagines personal and public memory through the medium of transmission, as an appropriate framework for uncertain, shifting structural and social realities. Small clusters of radio receivers, constantly shifted around the space, pick up the signal from a stationary mini FM transmitter. These receivers also engage with each other, chattering and heterodyning, becoming analogous to groups of people talking, and the social space of a gallery opening. Such chatter interjects the night airwaves of Dunedin, full of noise, clashing frequencies, and etheric vocal infiltrations, into what is usually perceived as the bounded space, silence and temporal amnesia of the ‘white cube’.

More on Radio Cegeste and Sally Ann McIntyre at radiocegeste.blogspot.com.

More info at salvagione.com and headlands.org.

This is the essay I wrote:

“The Olfactory Narrative”

The painter says that the graphic novelist damages the image by trampling it with text. The video artist says that the painter leverages nostalgia for ancient craft at the expense of modern craft. The sound artist says that the visual artist’s hegemony keeps sound registered as a second-class citizen, and then mumbles something about “apartheid,” as if floating a rhetorical test balloon. (It sinks.) The sculptor says that the visual artist and sound artist are coddled in the gallery, while sculptures weather the elements in the inevitable, and far from Edenic, “garden.” The tactile artist bemoans being stuck at the kids table. And the smell artist? No one asks the smell artist. No one notices the smell artist is in the room.

But since you ask: The smell artist prefers the graphic novelist’s earlier works because the aged paper has a dusty perfume. The smell artist can’t get close enough to the painter’s work because of those temperamental security guards — but just looking at it summons fond recollections of turpentine. The smell artist prefers sound art when it goes awry: there’s nothing like a short circuit to wake up one’s nostrils. The smell artist prefers sculpture during the weathering process: the musk of warm rain, the burn of tarmac under a hot sun, the tinge of iron ionizing in the open air, the way harsh winter air freezes nose hair. As for the tactile artist’s work, the smell artist simply remembers to wash because, reportedly, one raises one’s hand to one’s face 15.7 times per hour.

No one asks the smell artist, which is fine because the smell artist doesn’t speak much. The smell artist works in the manner of a nuclear scientist: in silence, with deliberate motion. The smell artist employs substances that, if mishandled, would fill a gallery with sensory overload, and just as quickly empty it of its patrons. Smells are reduced carefully to essential oils or their synthetic proxies. They are carefully contained in vessels: glass decanters whose hoses bring to mind medical equipment. The decanters are carefully engineered; with a simple touch they emit the requisite measure of scent. The decanters are modest sculptures, their glass essentially transparent. The aerosol they produce is so fine, down to 2.5 ångströms, one can barely hear it as it is emerges. Some of the liquids are as clear as the glass, and thus bring into question the concept, the purpose, of hue; released as vapor, they all are almost invisible. And finally, aligned in a particular sequence, the decanters tell the story that the smell artist desires to tell.

Again more on the work at salvagione.com.

These are the three previous Salvagione piece for which I have composed essays: Blackwork, Orbit, and Competitive Swinging. I will have an essay in a forthcoming publication from Extracurricular Press documenting another of his works, Element (images and details at boondesign.com). And here is a video documenting one of his exhibits, for which I provided music supervision (or as he delightfully put it, euphonic coordination): “An excuse to respond.”

The subject of scent and its orientation in regard to ambient sound came up during another recent project I participated in, related to the surrealist painter Remedios Varo. In my summary of that project, I mentioned an old essay by Brian Eno about scent that is worth a read in the context of Salvagione’s Vessels: “Scents and Sensibility.”

Photos by Andria Lo (andrialo.com), with exception of printing process, below, which is by Boon Design’s Brian Scott (twitter.com/boondesign).

Rob Walker, who looks even less like Elvis Costello than I do, digs into the subject at his designobserver.com blog, and rightly summarizes the key deficiency in the “dancing about architecture” slight. The notion of it being a slight is a matter of perception. The whole idea of “dancing about architecture” is, as he puts it, “fairly awesome.”

He digs further into this deficiency by taking issue with a telling comment from a piece, published earlier this year, in the Telegraph:

Writing about music has a serious built-in problem, which is that the only thing worth doing is also nearly impossible: to convey something of what the emotional experience of listening is like.

The Telegraph story was written by a classical pianist, Jonathan Bliss, on the occasion of his first ebook publication, a Kindle Single titled Beethoven’s Shadow. It’s a kind of musical memoir, a study by Bliss of his involvement in Beethoven’s music.

Walker, a friend since my New Orleans days, dissects that above sentence thusly:

Okay, this is the problem. An attempt to describe architecture via dance does seem obtuse; so does choosing dance as a medium to express the three-out-of-five stars or thumbs-up-thumbs-down version of “criticism.” But “writing about” something, music included, can obviously mean something beyond description paired with a judgment rendered. (In fact, even “criticism” ought to mean a lot more than that.) So I reject the restrictions that the above definition implies.

I was going to take some polite issue with the “obtuse” matter, but Rob shortly thereafter kind of did so himself, when he introduced, in a subsequent post, the concept of “ekphrasis” to the discussion — it’s the Greek term for a dramatic description of a work of art. The term is useful in various ways, in particular by making clear a long history for cross-medium interaction if not downright cross-pollination, and especially for a literary tradition.

It also brings to mind another Greek term essential to the consideration of borders between mediums: Laocoön (pictured below), the mythological figure from which Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (in his landmark Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry) derived his stricture that the arts, like the muses from which they borrowed their names, are distinct from each other. It’s a formidable text, but my interest in synaesthesia, the mixing of the senses, pretty much precludes me from fully agreeing with it. (As does my interest in comics. From a literary perspective, Lessing’s Laocoon can be read as a sort of a formalist version of Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent.)

But mostly, the sheer Greek-ness of ekphrasis reminds us of that modern mythological figure: Iannis Xenakis, the Greek genius who was equally accomplished in music and architecture. The clear parallels — geometric, aesthetic, philosophical — between his work in both fields evidence the extent to which ideas move back and forth between them. Lessing may have written the book on the perceived distinction between art forms, but it was his countryman, the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, born a few years before Lessing died (and, it is worth pointing out, a contemporary of Beethoven), who contributed a significant correction by famously describing architecture as “frozen music.” To look at Xenakis’ scores and at his buildings is to observe forms take similar shape. (At the top of this post are, side by side, Xenakis’ score “Metastasis” from 1954, and a photo of the Philips Pavilion from 1958, which Xenakis designed while working for Le Corbusier.) It’s arguable that Xenakis worked back and forth between music and architecture in pursuit of some elusive singular goal, each alternating effort akin to lifting one foot after the other on his way up a ladder.

Now, back to the Telegraph story by pianist Jonathan Bliss that Walker quoted above. There’s an interesting moment in the Telegraph piece that reveals some of Bliss’ thinking. It occurs in a sentence that happens to immediately follow the one Walker quotes. It goes like this:

This is so extraordinarily difficult because to write effectively you need to be direct, clear and specific, whereas the glory of music lies in its abstraction – its nearly infinite malleability according to the listener’s psychological state – and if you don’t embrace that, you are sure to miss its essence.

What’s worth focusing on is Bliss’ sense of what he terms “abstraction.” Certainly there is an element of abstraction in music, but I’d push back on Bliss’ comment a little. Much perceived “abstraction” is still in pursuit of something; there’s often what musicians refer to as an “idea” at the heart of the compositional activity. To write about a work of music can be a parallel matter of pursuing those ideas. One might not, as a result, express the ideas in abstract terms, but like Xenakis on his way up the proverbial ladder I have depicted, the ideas remain the goal — arguably a willfully elusive goal — in both situations. Indeed, such writing may not “convey” the “emotional experience,” as Bliss puts it, but it may bring its own pleasures to the pursuit.

In addition to Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock,” the poster series features Cybotron’s “Clear,” A Guy Called Gerald’s “Voodoo Ray,” and Adonis’ “No Way Back.” The beauty of Ricketts’ visual approach is how the rudimentary differences in the data belie the complexity of the individual tracks and the differences between them. By reverse-engineering the patterns, and representing them as static visual patterns, he points out how the drum machine is both instrument and score simultaneously — and, thus, how the drum machines of old prefigured the grid-based (and, generally, software-based) music tools of our time.

Here are two images of another Ricketts project, titled Book of White, in which he collated the names of all the different white papers he could find, to which he added some jokes. No word on whether Pae White, who collaborated with Brian Eno on an edition of Oblique Strategies, made the cut.

More at robricketts.co.uk. (Found via twitter.com/jensjonason via twitter.com/aw_4 via iso50.com.)

It’s written by Simon Spurrier, whose The Afterblight Chronicles: The Culled I read last year, and whose more recent A Serpent Uncoiled is on my to-do list. In any case, below are two consecutive pages from Spurrier’s Crossed, which is illustrated by Javier Barreno. Like Afterblight, it is a post-apocalyptic tale narrated by a lucky survivor, in this case someone who, like Spurrier, is a comics professional — or was, in the narrator’s case, since there is little apparent use for comics after the fall of civilization.

The scene depicted here takes place on a lighthouse where the character and his fellow survivors keep a lookout for the diseased humans who outnumber them and threaten them daily. Sound is a difficult thing to present visually, as too is listening, and I was struck by how Spurrier and Barreno sought to do it: first by using a tool (the ear horn), an archaic one at that; second, by emphasizing the effort by depicting the concentration on the character’s face; and third by using comic panels to bridge the physical gap between the listening and what is being listened for, in this case the motor of an approaching watercraft:

All reader warnings considered, here is where the comic is housed: crossedcomic.com.

I was honored to have been asked by John Kannenberg to contribute the foreword to the catalog for his exhibit Hours of Infinity. The introduction is by Egyptologist T.G. Wilfong. The catalog will be published this Friday, March 23. The exhibit consists of three parts, which have been running in Ann Arbor, Michigan, throughout this month. The work began as Kannenberg’s thesis project for the MFA program at the University of Michigan’s School of Art and Design. Much of it is being presented at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology (lsa.umich.edu), which ties together numerous aspects of Kannenberg’s past work, including sonic documents of everyday life, the cultural impact of ancient Egypt, and the institutions we call museums.

Here is the text of the forword:

Consider the word “phonography.” Note for a moment that there is an “n” where normally one would expect to find a “t” residing. The term is employed with increasing frequency to describe the act of recording environmental sound, the sound around us. The term’s close alignment with “photography” is helpful when orienting newcomers to field recordings. A phonographer, like a photographer, captures a document of the real world and then proceeds to frame it, transforming it from documentation into art. Photographers are taught to “frame with the lens,” but of course they employ all manner of tools after shooting an image to nudge it toward what they saw with their mind’s eye. Likewise, contemporary music composers frequently take field recordings and from them produce original works, in which the recordings are manipulated into something situated ambiguously between ambient sound and ambient music: what they heard with their mind’s ear.

As a descriptive term, “phonography” has utility, but associations with photography are not optimal. Sound occurs over time. For that reason, field recordings have more in common with film and video than with photography. One can stare at a photograph, step away, return to it. But a recording of sound or visuals, or both, plays back at its own pace; the audience can only appreciate it as it speeds past them, much like the tireless motion of history.

History can itself serve as a frame. In 2010, the artist John Kannenberg took a trip to Egypt, where he made detailed audio recordings in and around local museums. The Western imagination associates Egyptian antiquity with the deepest recesses of human history, a moment akin to dawn along the infinite developmental timeline of intellectual consciousness; the setting lent his work spiritual as well as archeological timbres. By documenting the sound of museums, he turned the concept of “sound art” inside out: listening for sound inherent in institutions that house art.

Little did he know that in less than a year, one of those museums would become a battlefield in the Egyptian Spring, a political uprising that in its first few days took the life of a promising Egyptian artist named Ahmed Basiony. In short order, sounds Kannenberg recorded in the spirit of John Cage’s 4’33″ — to acknowledge the transient beauty in everyday sound — became a retroactive, somber memorial; a document of observational neutrality took on political force. Kannenberg had done nothing to alter the sounds he recorded, imposed no filters, added no instrumentation. History had done the work. The sounds of museum-goers’ footsteps became those of ghosts.

There are various sorts of history. Among them is the linear course of an individual artist’s career. Kannenberg’s has taken many shapes: musician, performer, recording artist, proprietor of the Stasisfield record label, curator, sound artist, visual artist, art student. Each new work of his joins the continuity of what preceded it; each new work alters our understanding of what occurred earlier. The Red and Black Land drawings become extensions of visuals he oversaw on Stasisfield productions. The sound installations expand on his early recorded material. And by actively occupying a museum for his latest work, he can be heard, himself, wrestling with its ghosts.

More on the exhibit at hoursofinfinity.tumblr.com. More on Kannenberg at johnkannenberg.com. Above images drawn from his photos at flickr.com.

The sounds he recorded carry with them several meanings. To begin with, they are in stark contrast with the more general, ambient noises that Kannenberg has documented at various museums around the world, from the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, an ongoing homage to John Cage’s famed 4’33″. While so much documentary audio captures the wide swath of noise at a specific location, there is little in Kannenberg’s Kelsey shelf documentation aside from the creak of gears, the rattling of wheels, the sedimentary slamming of heavy metal structures. The sounds are, furthermore, significantly distant from the more politically charged museum recordings that served as Kannenberg’s memorial for Ahmed Basiony, the artist slain in the early days of the Egyptian uprising a year ago. And finally, and perhaps foremost, the mortuary aura of these sounds reflects the archeological subject matter of the Kelsey’s holdings.

Kannenberg uploaded the shelf sounds along with another set of library noises, those of a separate mechanical procedure, one in which a human handles the chores. It is the sound of pages being turned in an original edition of the Description de l’Égypte, the 1798 collection of findings from the Napoleanic Expedition. (It isn’t Kannenberg turning the pages, but Egyptologist T.G. Wilfong, who is also credited with “shelf manipulation” on the first track.) The volume is part of the Kelsey holdings:

There is a special beauty to Kannenberg’s sound work here, because he has captured the ephemeral noises, the intangible byproduct, of an institution dedicated to preserving physical artifacts. He has documented the sonic archaeology of an archeology museum.

Both files were posted to Kannenberg’s soundcloud.com/stasisfield account. More on the Kelsey at lsa.umich.edu. This coming month, Kannenberg will have an extensive exhibit, which involves performance, at the museum. More on that exhibit, titled Hours of Infinity, at hoursofinfinity.tumblr.com. I wrote the foreword to the exhibit’s catalog. More on Kannenberg at johnkannenberg.com.

(The above image is a detail from a mummiform coffin, part of the Kelsey collection, dating from 525 BC.)