Sonic Fiction as the Mapping of Difference

TY - ABST

T1 - Sonic Fiction as the Mapping of Difference

AU - Holmboe, Rasmus

AU - Stricker, Jan Høgh

PY - 2015

Y1 - 2015

N2 - The here proposed audio paper/audio lecture performance is an iteration of a site-specific participatory performance piece by Danish artist, composer and musician, Andreas Führer. The piece, which has the title THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY D’OR, is a scored sound walk, which shows a map designating a walking route through the town of Roskilde. Along the route various locations are pointed out where the audience is instructed to stop and listen. The score also contains a quote from Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition and on the backside of the map there is a set of breathing exercises that can be performed during the walk. The piece epitomises the bodily and highly situated listening situation of a site-specific participatory sound performance, while at the same time engendering a speculative impulse due to the various references that can be read from the score. At the same time THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY D’OR is basically a very open piece that shows a minimum of authorial composerly control and thus can be appropriated by any participant in any possible way. Taking this situation as a point of departure, the here proposed audio lecture performance engages with the format of a site-specific audio paper from the perspective that once audio is recorded, it is also dislocated and thus it enters a into different relation with its site-specificity. Sound is never experienced in the absence of the other senses, and thus both recording and dislocating sound effectively transforms the sonic experience. Trying to maintain the basic openness of the piece by Führer as well as the highly situational aspect of any listening situation, the proposed audio lecture performance is not a hermeneutic or representational interpretation of the piece, but rather an experimentalist iteration of it. Using Führer’s piece as a machine for thinking differently about the relations between embodied experience, academic representation and performative appropriation, the paper makes an argument for replacing conceptions of difference founded on linguistic representational notions of identity with a performative conception of difference (Barad, 2007) that acts as an actualisation of a virtual that is inherently real, but always different from that which it actualises (Bergson 1889, 1896; Deleuze, 1966). Through on- and off-site recordings, written monologue/dialogue and studio manipulation the audio paper applies and tries to merge bodily, sensible and theoretical levels in ways that does not want to turn the map into the territory but rather creates a new map (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, Deleuze, 1981). To pursue this end, the audio lecture performance mobilises the concept of sonic fiction (Schulze, 2013) as a discussion and contextualisation of sonic materialist (Cox, 2011) and signifying representationalist (Kim-Cohen, 2009) positions.

AB - The here proposed audio paper/audio lecture performance is an iteration of a site-specific participatory performance piece by Danish artist, composer and musician, Andreas Führer. The piece, which has the title THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY D’OR, is a scored sound walk, which shows a map designating a walking route through the town of Roskilde. Along the route various locations are pointed out where the audience is instructed to stop and listen. The score also contains a quote from Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition and on the backside of the map there is a set of breathing exercises that can be performed during the walk. The piece epitomises the bodily and highly situated listening situation of a site-specific participatory sound performance, while at the same time engendering a speculative impulse due to the various references that can be read from the score. At the same time THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY D’OR is basically a very open piece that shows a minimum of authorial composerly control and thus can be appropriated by any participant in any possible way. Taking this situation as a point of departure, the here proposed audio lecture performance engages with the format of a site-specific audio paper from the perspective that once audio is recorded, it is also dislocated and thus it enters a into different relation with its site-specificity. Sound is never experienced in the absence of the other senses, and thus both recording and dislocating sound effectively transforms the sonic experience. Trying to maintain the basic openness of the piece by Führer as well as the highly situational aspect of any listening situation, the proposed audio lecture performance is not a hermeneutic or representational interpretation of the piece, but rather an experimentalist iteration of it. Using Führer’s piece as a machine for thinking differently about the relations between embodied experience, academic representation and performative appropriation, the paper makes an argument for replacing conceptions of difference founded on linguistic representational notions of identity with a performative conception of difference (Barad, 2007) that acts as an actualisation of a virtual that is inherently real, but always different from that which it actualises (Bergson 1889, 1896; Deleuze, 1966). Through on- and off-site recordings, written monologue/dialogue and studio manipulation the audio paper applies and tries to merge bodily, sensible and theoretical levels in ways that does not want to turn the map into the territory but rather creates a new map (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, Deleuze, 1981). To pursue this end, the audio lecture performance mobilises the concept of sonic fiction (Schulze, 2013) as a discussion and contextualisation of sonic materialist (Cox, 2011) and signifying representationalist (Kim-Cohen, 2009) positions.

M3 - Conference abstract for conference

ER -