RELATIONAL AESTHETICS: CREATIVITY IN THE INTER-HUMAN SPHERE By Carl Patow, MD, MPH, MBA A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, 2019. Major Director: Pamela Taylor Turner, Associate Professor, Kinetic Imaging, VCU Arts Relational Art was first described as an art movement in Nicolas Bourriaud’s catalogue for the exhibition Traffic in 1995, and in an eponymous book in 1998. He observed that contemporary artists were shifting the focus of their work away from creating objects of spectacle to interaction with viewers through dialogue. Examination of a sample of representative artists’ work demonstrates a wide variety of applications that variously include objects. Inclusion of objects in relational artwork raises important theoretic considerations about the definition of the genre and its application to specific artworks. In the thesis artwork, WORKS WHEN, Carl Patow engages individuals in Richmond, Virginia, in conversations, documenting the location of their neighborhood and recording observations they make about their neighborhoods on polychrome tiles. The collected tiles are formed into “communities” on a floor map of the city. The work includes both conversation and objects in its creation, realization and exhibition. In doing so, WORKS WHEN is both an example of Relational Aesthetics and an expansion of its scope as a genre.

I work in the medium of song. A multidisciplinary artist and composer, I make work that is immersive, time-based and often participatory. I interact with landscape and the complexities of American history, bringing into focus local ecologies through the lens of song. This document accompanies my thesis performance The Sound of a Stone, an immersive exploration of song, language, ecology and locational listening performed in a 4-channel surround format. In the semi-improvised composition, I sample live vocals, mandolin and found natural objects in a combination of roots music traditions and experimental techniques. Utilizing the software Ableton Live to process and layer the samples in real time, I build a series of "songscapes" which connect to a specific site: the fall line of the James River. The Sound of a Stone premiered April 8, 2019 at Sonia Vlahcevic Concert Hall, W. E. Singleton Center for the Performing Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia.

The aim of this thesis is to survey the discussions around the position of sound art within the broader arts, and to explore strategies and research areas within fine art and my own practice, so as to identify new areas of enquiry and develop my work within this field. I investigate the phenomenology of vision and hearing and contrast the different ways these two senses operate as primary sources of perception. I analyse the privileging of sight and the dominance of the visual in art institutions. Ideas of the literal and model subject within installation art are explored and the convergence of these subjectivities is overlaid with this phenomenological research, in order to develop a direction within installation art. The lack of authoritative sources in this field, beyond the few relevant texts, has meant that my research has employed respected new media and the Internet as a second tier of sources. I also analyse my own practice as an example of how sound art activates extramusical ideas. My research concludes that sound art has much to reveal to the broader arts community about perception and the creation of meaning, and also that there are many prospective avenues of enquiry within fine arts for the inclusion and analysis of audio based work. Keywords: sound art; phenomenology; hearing; privileging of sight; subjectivities; extramusical; perception.

This is a composite thesis realised in a sound installation titled Blitz: Discursive bombardments in ‘the war on terror’ with a supporting exegesis. The exegesis offers a context for the project in sound art theory and practice, focussing specifically on the history of experimental ‘electrovocal’ expressive forms. It provides an account of the artist’s perspectives on the topic itself: contemporary political discourse on themes of security and danger. The exegesis also defines the scope of the project and documents the creative process undergone to realise its outcome: an installation apparatus capable of folding visitors into a heightened sense of the zeitgeist of early 21st century Australia. The genealogy of the project is described in terms of pivotal decisions and insights, technologies and techniques used, and aesthetic and ethical concerns. The nexus of voice – its material and metaphorical resonances in public discourse – and technologies for recording, manipulating and circulating sound are central to the development of this apparatus. The core body of sounds used in the installation are the voices of politicians, media presenters, members of the public and ‘experts’ and are presented in the form of short sound bites. These were sampled from many hours of recordings of news and current affairs material captured from Australian public broadcasters (radio and television, the ABC and SBS) over the pre-election months of 2004. The voices extol and debate diverse ‘angles’ on the so-called ‘war on terror’ and its physical enactments and outcomes in the war on Iraq. Other sounds offset the voices to enhance a sense of surreal ambience and introduce meanings through metaphor; children’s voices; rhythmically dripping taps; footsteps; ticking clocks; the drone of planes overhead. Various sound processing techniques are applied to samples and a sonic montage iscreated through random juxtapositions of sounds played synchronously from an assemblage of iPods. The figure of the labyrinth is central to the work on many levels, materially and metaphorically. It is used to structure movement through the installation space, a dimly lit ‘black box’ studio of ten by eight metres. Against the traditional practice of silently ‘walking the labyrinth’ as metaphor for a ‘journey within’, the Blitz labyrinth invites walkers to fold themselves into a dynamic field of allusions and aural messages and thereby to warp and shift the emerging play of meanings. The walk wends in and out of proximity to seven iPods set in small portable speakers and dispersed around the floor of the installation space. The ‘pods’ broadcast playlists of sounds bites that play randomly in ‘shuffle’ mode – against one another and against silences – to convey a sense of immersion in the discursive blitz of messages about terrorism and war from the media. The labyrinth is drawn out across the floor in dashed lines – made from small reflective rectangles that light up as visitors move around the space with torches – and is designed to suggest the feel of a road or a landing ground at night. The meandering trajectory of walking bodies around the curves of the labyrinth creates a choreography of audition, of moving and listening strategically to a barrage of sound from ever shifting perspectives. It invites walkers to listen for possibilities that may lie between and beyond the dominant narratives of western political leaders, to locate the gaps and silences. Beyond the pervasive noise of discourse normalised by politicians and the media, what is it that we might otherwise wish to hear and to speak?

AURAL REGENERATION by MYRNA LEE PRONCHUK Under the Direction of Craig Dongoski ABSTRACT The aim of this thesis is to survey the abstraction of the human experience obscuring the confines between form and expression, sound and visual, experience and imitation. In establishing multiple levels of communication, I began with gathering discarded found objects, which I repurposed through building hybrid musical sculptures. The act of mark making mapped out systems and direction, and escalated into a form of hybrid musical notation. Both forms of hybrids informed each other in its development process. When the hybrid instruments and notation were placed in an environment together with the elements of Digital Signal Processing (DSP), it created a natural progression for performance. The objects required interaction: to be hit, tapped, bowed and plucked, with their sounds processed through DSP, and projected back into the audience, who participated in creating interactivity. In producing mechanical musical instruments, along with mark making, installation and experimental sound recordings, a platform is established allowing for a dialogue between audio and visual elements, and human experience.

Uppsatsen undersöker med konstformen ljudkonst och den konstnärliga hanteringen av ljud i fokus en interaktion mellan finkultur och populärkultur. Fokus ligger på aktörer inom populärkulturen som använt sig av konstnärliga strategier med rötter i finkulturen. Undersökningen spårar ljudkonstens historiska bakgrund och främst de förlopp som bidragit till att det är en gränsöverskridande konstform. Den populärkulturella konstvärldens etablering som en social organisation där konstnärlig verksamhet är möjlig undersöks. / With concentration on the art form sound art and the artistic treatment of sound, this essay investigates an interaction between the fine arts and popular culture. The focus is on participants within popular culture that used artistic strategies with roots in the fin arts. The study traces sound arts historical background and the events that contributed to the fact that it is an interdisciplinary art form. The pop-cultural art world’s establishment as a social organization where artistic activity is possible is studied.

J.O. Mallander’s Extended Play (1968) is a sound recording, a readymade, of the counting of votes in two presidential elections in Finland, during 1962 and 1968. A voice repeats monotonously: “Kekkonen, Kekkonen, Kekkonen, Kekkonen, Kekkonen…” Although the Finnish president Urho Kekkonen represents, almost personifies, the politics of the post World War II period in Finland, Extended Play does not explicitly address the political. Rather, as this essay argues, it engages in the discourses of power and politics by providing a temporalization of its fixedness, or what Jacques Derrida terms the proper. Extended Play is, in parallel with Derrida’s critique of western metaphysics, a deconstruction in sound that challenges the state ideologies conveyed in the process of the counting of votes, where the presuppositions of the presence of the voice characterizes the ambiguities of power that Kekkonen’s politics of neutrality represent. Mallander’s readymade emerges as a double of the game theory strategies of the Cold War, a mimetic surplus of the administrative control mechanisms of sound recording. Through overturning the dialectics of the original and the copy, where repetition of sound also temporalizes the representation of the proper, it does not unequivocally reproduce its content. As an aural document, repeated and mass-produced as a record, it devalues, therefore, presumptions of origin. Derrida’s idea of “sous rature” initiates, in the discussion of Extended Play as a specific form of conceptual sound art, the notion of sound under erasure, which is not reducible to an auditory or medium-specific practice.

This is a composite thesis realised in a sound installation titled Blitz: Discursive bombardments in ‘the war on terror’ with a supporting exegesis. The exegesis offers a context for the project in sound art theory and practice, focussing specifically on the history of experimental ‘electrovocal’ expressive forms. It provides an account of the artist’s perspectives on the topic itself: contemporary political discourse on themes of security and danger. The exegesis also defines the scope of the project and documents the creative process undergone to realise its outcome: an installation apparatus capable of folding visitors into a heightened sense of the zeitgeist of early 21st century Australia. The genealogy of the project is described in terms of pivotal decisions and insights, technologies and techniques used, and aesthetic and ethical concerns. The nexus of voice – its material and metaphorical resonances in public discourse – and technologies for recording, manipulating and circulating sound are central to the development of this apparatus. The core body of sounds used in the installation are the voices of politicians, media presenters, members of the public and ‘experts’ and are presented in the form of short sound bites. These were sampled from many hours of recordings of news and current affairs material captured from Australian public broadcasters (radio and television, the ABC and SBS) over the pre-election months of 2004. The voices extol and debate diverse ‘angles’ on the so-called ‘war on terror’ and its physical enactments and outcomes in the war on Iraq. Other sounds offset the voices to enhance a sense of surreal ambience and introduce meanings through metaphor; children’s voices; rhythmically dripping taps; footsteps; ticking clocks; the drone of planes overhead. Various sound processing techniques are applied to samples and a sonic montage iscreated through random juxtapositions of sounds played synchronously from an assemblage of iPods. The figure of the labyrinth is central to the work on many levels, materially and metaphorically. It is used to structure movement through the installation space, a dimly lit ‘black box’ studio of ten by eight metres. Against the traditional practice of silently ‘walking the labyrinth’ as metaphor for a ‘journey within’, the Blitz labyrinth invites walkers to fold themselves into a dynamic field of allusions and aural messages and thereby to warp and shift the emerging play of meanings. The walk wends in and out of proximity to seven iPods set in small portable speakers and dispersed around the floor of the installation space. The ‘pods’ broadcast playlists of sounds bites that play randomly in ‘shuffle’ mode – against one another and against silences – to convey a sense of immersion in the discursive blitz of messages about terrorism and war from the media. The labyrinth is drawn out across the floor in dashed lines – made from small reflective rectangles that light up as visitors move around the space with torches – and is designed to suggest the feel of a road or a landing ground at night. The meandering trajectory of walking bodies around the curves of the labyrinth creates a choreography of audition, of moving and listening strategically to a barrage of sound from ever shifting perspectives. It invites walkers to listen for possibilities that may lie between and beyond the dominant narratives of western political leaders, to locate the gaps and silences. Beyond the pervasive noise of discourse normalised by politicians and the media, what is it that we might otherwise wish to hear and to speak?

This is a composite thesis realised in a sound installation titled Blitz: Discursive bombardments in ‘the war on terror’ with a supporting exegesis. The exegesis offers a context for the project in sound art theory and practice, focussing specifically on the history of experimental ‘electrovocal’ expressive forms. It provides an account of the artist’s perspectives on the topic itself: contemporary political discourse on themes of security and danger. The exegesis also defines the scope of the project and documents the creative process undergone to realise its outcome: an installation apparatus capable of folding visitors into a heightened sense of the zeitgeist of early 21st century Australia. The genealogy of the project is described in terms of pivotal decisions and insights, technologies and techniques used, and aesthetic and ethical concerns. The nexus of voice – its material and metaphorical resonances in public discourse – and technologies for recording, manipulating and circulating sound are central to the development of this apparatus. The core body of sounds used in the installation are the voices of politicians, media presenters, members of the public and ‘experts’ and are presented in the form of short sound bites. These were sampled from many hours of recordings of news and current affairs material captured from Australian public broadcasters (radio and television, the ABC and SBS) over the pre-election months of 2004. The voices extol and debate diverse ‘angles’ on the so-called ‘war on terror’ and its physical enactments and outcomes in the war on Iraq. Other sounds offset the voices to enhance a sense of surreal ambience and introduce meanings through metaphor; children’s voices; rhythmically dripping taps; footsteps; ticking clocks; the drone of planes overhead. Various sound processing techniques are applied to samples and a sonic montage iscreated through random juxtapositions of sounds played synchronously from an assemblage of iPods. The figure of the labyrinth is central to the work on many levels, materially and metaphorically. It is used to structure movement through the installation space, a dimly lit ‘black box’ studio of ten by eight metres. Against the traditional practice of silently ‘walking the labyrinth’ as metaphor for a ‘journey within’, the Blitz labyrinth invites walkers to fold themselves into a dynamic field of allusions and aural messages and thereby to warp and shift the emerging play of meanings. The walk wends in and out of proximity to seven iPods set in small portable speakers and dispersed around the floor of the installation space. The ‘pods’ broadcast playlists of sounds bites that play randomly in ‘shuffle’ mode – against one another and against silences – to convey a sense of immersion in the discursive blitz of messages about terrorism and war from the media. The labyrinth is drawn out across the floor in dashed lines – made from small reflective rectangles that light up as visitors move around the space with torches – and is designed to suggest the feel of a road or a landing ground at night. The meandering trajectory of walking bodies around the curves of the labyrinth creates a choreography of audition, of moving and listening strategically to a barrage of sound from ever shifting perspectives. It invites walkers to listen for possibilities that may lie between and beyond the dominant narratives of western political leaders, to locate the gaps and silences. Beyond the pervasive noise of discourse normalised by politicians and the media, what is it that we might otherwise wish to hear and to speak?

O presente trabalho versa sobre o aproveitamento compositivo dos entornos sonoros. Para esta pesquisa em composição musical, foram utilizados, como campo de estudo, entornos sonoros localizados dentro de perímetros urbanos e, como materiais na aproximação ambiente/composição explorada, diversas potencialidades musicais dos sons que constituem os entornos sonoros e as organizações deles emergentes. Também foram contempladas como motivadoras e força de coesão nos processos compositivos realizados diversas características da escuta no meio ambiente e do fluxo do entorno sonoro com suas variações. As composições foram realizadas para meios acústicos e eletroacústicos, considerando-se o espaço de diversas maneiras. / This work deals with the compositional use of sound environments and their reflection. For this research in music composition, sound environments located within urban perimeters were used as a field of study, and as materials for the approach environment / composition that explore the diverse musical capabilities of the sounds that make up the surroundings and the sound of these emerging organizations. As a motivating and cohesive force in the processes undertaken, several characteristics of the listening in the environment and the flux of the sound environment and its variations have been included also. The compositions were realized through acoustic and electroacoustic media comprising the space in different ways.