Site of Sound #2

Since the publication of the first volume of Site of Sound in 1999 the issues and activities pertaining to sound and architecture have expanded to circulate more dynamically within the fields of sound art, sound design, and spatial practices. From acoustical technologies and urban planning to public art, concerns for auditory structures and the experiences of listening are finding deeper footing within both artistic and environmental contexts. Recent noise mappings across Europe, along with new possibilities for acoustical implementation, as well as the ongoing emergence of sound art and design educational programs, point toward sound as a crucial subject for thinking through contemporary culture and politics.

Site of Sound Vol. 2 aims to address contemporary work being done in the cross-over between sound and architecture. The anthology brings together new research and writing that charts out the theoretical implications and consequences for artistic and spatial discourses, while documenting contemporary projects that come to occupy and define a sonic-spatial territory.

With contributions by Justin Bennett, Usman Haque, David Schafer, James Webb, Edwin van der Heide, Raviv Ganchrow, Jodi Rose, Nigel Helyer, Michael Gendreau, Jean-Paul Thibaud, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, Oliver Laric, David Stalling & Anthony Kelly, Romano, Natasha Barrett & Birger Sevaldson, Scott Arford & Randy Yau, Riccardo Benassi, Carrie Bodle, Jenny Picket & Julien Ottavi, Joaquín Gutiérrez Hadid, Pascal Broccolichi, Jacob Kreutzfeldt, & Björn Quiring

For an art against the cartography of everyday life by Ryan Griffis

The title of this essay is a remix of the title of an essay by artist Martha Rosler originally published in 1979, “For an Art Against the Mythology of Everyday Life”. Rosler’s text is an engagement with what was then the emerging context now often referred to as “post-industrial globalization.” More specifically, it is an engagement from the perspective of someone attempting to make things – art works – that can “address these banally profound issues of everyday life, thereby revealing the public and political in the personal”. She was particularly interested in both the oppressive and potentially liberating aspects of “mass media.” Here, I want to take up where Rosler left off, discussing the potential of art, and technology, to “step toward reasonably and humanely changing the world” using the example of what is commonly referred to as “locative media.”

For the full essay, follow the link.

Designing Geo-politics conference to stream live

This weekend the Designing Geo-politics conference at UCSD will be available as an HD stream. Also, this weekend is the Art and Politics conference at The Hammer Museum.

Digital Rubbish - new book, Jennifer Gabrys

This is a study of the material life of information and its devices; of electronic waste in its physical and electronic incarnations; a cultural and material mapping of the spaces where electronics in the form of both hardware and information accumulate, break down, or are stowed away. Electronic waste occurs not just in the form of discarded computers but also as a scatter of information devices, software, and systems that are rendered obsolete and fail. Where other studies have addressed "digital" technology through a focus on its immateriality or virtual qualities, Gabrys traces the material, spatial, cultural, and political infrastructures that enable the emergence and dissolution of these technologies. In the course of her book, she explores five interrelated "spaces" where electronics fall apart: from Silicon Valley to Nasdaq, from containers bound for China to museums and archives that preserve obsolete electronics as cultural artifacts, to the landfill as material repository. All together, these sites stack up into a sedimentary record that forms the "natural history" of this study.

Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics describes the materiality of electronics from a unique perspective, examining the multiple forms of waste that electronics create as evidence of the resources, labor, and imaginaries that are bundled into these machines. By drawing on the material analysis developed by Walter Benjamin, this natural history method allows for an inquiry into electronics that focuses neither on technological progression nor on great inventors but rather considers the ways in which electronic technologies fail and decay. Ranging across studies of media and technology, as well as environments, geography, and design, Jennifer Gabrys pulls together the far-reaching material and cultural processes that enable the making and breaking of these technologies.

Jennifer Gabrys is Senior Lecturer in Design and Convener of the Masters in Design and Environment in the Department of Design, Goldsmiths, University of London.