LABS

The Revolution is Hear! by Florian Hollerweger

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Photograph by courtesy of Charlotte Sternberg (Vienna, 2006).

Leonardo Abstract Services (LABS) 2010-2012
The Revolution is Hear! Sound Art, the Everyday and Aural Awareness

This thesis presents a body of practical and theoretical work, which interprets sound art as a means of encouraging aural awareness in an everyday context. Through a methodological feedback loop of artistic practice and theoretical reflection, strategies for the aestheticisation of everyday aural experience have been developed and situated within a wider context of contemporary aural culture. The current state of this culture is critically examined. The widespread claim that we live in a deeply visualised culture is questioned. It is argued that contemporary Western society can also be characterised in terms of an increasing interest in auditory perception, which the development of sound art as an artistic discipline is one symptom of. The technological mediation of listening is discussed and characterised in terms of a mobilisation and individuation of aural experience. An overview of different listening modes informs a discussion of six different perspectives on sound as a physical and perceptual phenomenon. Various listening practices, which have been proposed in the field of sound art, are presented. It is argued that the development of sound art as an artistic discipline can be characterised in terms of an interest in the everyday as a source of sound material on one, and as an environment for aestheticised listening on the other hand. Sound art is proposed as a means of auralising the rhythms inherent to everyday life, and subtlety is identified as an aesthetic category for doing so. It is investigated how technological mediation can be applied to the aestheticisation of mobile and social listening experiences. The above issues have been addressed by means of artistic practice. The results of this process are presented as a portfolio of eight artworks, including sound installations, public interventions, site-specific electroacoustic pieces, graphical scores and mobile hardware projects.

Degree: PhD
Year: 2011
Pages: 237
University: Queen’s University Belfast
Supervisor: Dr. Pedro Rebelo, Prof. Michael Alcorn
Semail:
Language: English
Dept: Sonic Arts Research Centre
Copyright: Florian Hollerweger
Lang_author: German, English
Url: http://flo.mur.at/writings/phd_thesis
Email: fhollerweger01@qub.ac.uk
Keywords: Aural culture, technologically mediated listening, modes of listening, mobile listening, social listening, acoustic ecology, aestheticised listening, aural awareness, the everyday, sound art

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.

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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.