Screen capture from "U Have Been Disconnected for Flooding," by Michael Austin (2011).

LABS

The Phenomenological Impact of Interface by Michael Austin

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Screen capture from “U Have Been Disconnected for Flooding,” by Michael Austin (2011).

Leonardo Abstract Services (LABS) 2010-2012
The Phenomenological Impact of Interface on the Analysis of Digital Music and Sonic Art

The experience of an artwork is just as important as any other constituent element of the work, particularly in contemporary digital music and sonic art. While theorists analyze a piece to find out “how it works,” the actual experience of the work in question is often disregarded in favor of a score and an abstract conception of the “object” being analyzed; further, the system within which, or for which, the work was created has an enormous impact on the experience of the musical or sonic artwork, but it, too, is not often acknowledged.

This dissertation investigates the experience of music and sonic art and examines how interface relates to that experience. I make a case for the phenomenological analysis of contemporary music and sonic art, offer a new inclusive definition of interface as it relates to works of these genres, and propose a pragmatic, hybrid analytical technique for phenomenological investigation. Further, I address issues of the experience of temporality, energetics, interaction, and other relationships within a medium (and among media) in selected works that have hitherto been considered “un-analyzable” because they lie outside of traditional analytical paradigms.

Degree: Ph.D. in the Humanities – Aesthetic Studies (Arts and Technology)
Year: 2011
Pages: 206
University: University of Texas at Dallas
Supervisor: Frank Dufour
Semail: Frank.Dufour@utdallas.edu
Supervisor 2: Robert Xavier Rodriguez
Language: English
Dept: Arts and Technology
Copyright: Michael Austin
Lang_author: English
Url:
Email: michael.austin@utdallas.edu
Keywords: phenomenology, music, sound art, interface, Unités Sémiotique Temporelles, musicology, aesthetics

LEONARDO ABSTRACTS SERVICE (LABS) is a comprehensive collection of Ph.D., Masters and MFA thesis abstracts on topics in the emerging intersection between art, science and technology.

If you are interested you can submit your abstract to the English LABS, Spanish LABS, Chinese LABS and French LABS international Peer Review Panels for inclusion in their respective databases. The authors of abstracts most highly ranked by the panel will also be invited to submit an article for consideration for publication in the refereed journal Leonardo.

Lanfranco Aceti is known for his social activism and extensive career as artist, curator, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. He is also the Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, The MIT Press. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including Car Park, a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; Who The People?, an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; and Hope Coming On, a site-specific choral performance he designed for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with the collaboration of the Boston Children’s Chorus, and realized in front of Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). In 2017, Aceti prepared a series of new artworks for an exhibition entitled Shimmer and curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra, a new large choral performance titled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and Knock, Knock, Knocking a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki.