Sound art

In the Western epistemology of sound, sound has been placed under the umbrella of music. That is to say that the only sound arena which has been systematised in the West is music. Sound theorist Douglas Khan writes: 'despite the cultural pervasiveness of sound, there was no artistic practice outside music identified primarily with auralitythe privileging of music as the art of sound in modern Western culture (has meant) that no audible sounds existed outside music'.5 And yet music is a subset of sound. However, due to the obscuration of sound, a lack of vocabulary for sound analysis, sound in certain instances (for example, film sound) has been analysed by a music model (loudness, pitch, timbre).6

The emergence of sound art in the broader art arena is a recent phenomenon. Although film sound- and radiowaves have been travelling through the ether for most of this century, the appearance of sound in the institutionalised art context is relatively new. Avant-garde artists have been experimenting with transgressive sound, both machine and vocally engendered, for the past century (notably the Futurists, Surrealists and Dadaists); however, it has only been in the past ten years or so that artists have consistently been manipulating sounds in a gallery context.

It is important to note that a fascination with electricity and sound is not confined to contemporary artists. Khan points out that modern artists' fixation with sound 'was concurrent with the phonographic capture of sound in the later 19th Century' and that 'this connection between sound and technology has endured', continuing in the practice of contemporary media artists.7

Current sound art practices in art institutions (galleries, museums) could be said to be derived from the conceptual art practices of the 1960s and 1970s; however, the recent predominance of sound art practitioners using a variety of mediums may be indicative of a tendency towards a more sonic, less visual expression of cultural practice.
The appearance in recent years of international conferences, exhibitions, Websites and publications specifically dealing with sound bears an aural witness to the role of sound in cultural production.8 Across the airwaves, advocates in film, radio and the 'visual arts' are engaging with the specificities of sound. Sound art has hitherto been a relatively untheorised zone. Research into the art practice of women artists using electricity to generate sound is timely in the current cultural climate in which texts on sound in radio and film are hitting the shelves of bookshops in waves.

The visual aspect of the works being inherent, positioning sound art within a visual art context may seem paradoxical. However, these works are made by women who call themselves artists, who use the medium of sound; theirs is a privileging of sound over the visual. Does the prevalence of sound art signal the end of a privileging of sight in dominant cultural practices? Are we indeed becoming more aurally attuned?

In what ways do the carefully constructed electrical apparatuses emitting sounds call forth a new listening? The work is sited in a multifarious field, straddling discourses as divergent as sound theory, electrical science, art production, philosophy and feminist theory. The terrain is new and thus parameters are difficult to define: it is a trajectory as yet unmapped.

Women and electricity

According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 'electricity is a form of energy'.9 Electricity is named after three mythological women, all of whom shared the name Electra10, and has continued to be feminised since. At the Paris World Fair, the 'Spirit of Electricity' was gendered as female.11 Gillian Beer notes that at the turn of the century 'the force of electricity is a female power'.12 However, until recently, women's history with electricity has not been one of empowerment.13

Throughout the rarefied history of electricity women are seldom mentioned. Female experimenters or philosophers are nonexistent. When they are mentioned, they have been positioned in rather absurd ways, usually as witnesses of men's electrical feats or in relation to bizarre circumstances.14 Electrical emanations (crackles and light flashes) from women's clothing were a fascination.

In a culture that privileges sight above hearing, it is not surprising that the production of light became the focus of electrical currency. Carolyn Marvin describes ways in which electricity was used to 'light up' women's bodies by superimposing an armature of light bulbs.15 Women's bodies coded as commodity, written on by the hubris of a hegemonic sight. Electricity gendered as the 'other' is adorned, bedazzled as the quintessential decorative beauty. Woman as purveyor of someone else's experiment and design. Marvin writes: 'The electric light as bodily embellishment, a human scale variation on the electric light as public spectacle, was a communications phenomena of the first order.'16

Electricity and sound

Imagine a time when electrical devices were designed to make sounds. Not light, but sounds. Can we imagine electricity emitting sounds rather than light? Imagine electrical machines that whirr, zap and whiz. A time when electrical sounds are generated by women What time frame does your imagination alight upon? Do you flip to a past now forgotten by the rubrics of a technological present? Or perhaps to a future, albeit unsounded as yet? A time when women-as artists, not scientists or philosophers-explore the boundaries of electrical charges using sound as the focus. Women artists utilising the raw material of electricity to produce sound (not light).

A present unconcealing

Imagine this. Your feet walking over loose ceramic tiles, a path located between an ocean of small rocks. As your feet rise and fall, a feeling of discomfort is embodied as the tiles move, sides scraping as your balance adjusts to the unstable ground. Footfalls sounding in collaboration with adjoining sounds. A space set aside. Larger rocks from the earth's core lie to either side and metallic protrusions rise out of their form sounding eerie songs, randomly. The mechanical/technical/earth heartbeat intermix creating a plethora of codes as the poetic transverses the improbable.

Signals: rock sonances sounding across time immemorial and combining with present technospace. Presumed inert rock materiality releasing individual vibrations reminding one that all matter resounds to its own vibration. Soundings of time, of depth, of temperature, of space. Time in space. Sound in space. These are the ancient rhythms resounding through space in present time in Joan Brassil's work, Randomly Now and Then.17

Invoking the ether

Heidegger describes a process of unconcealing, in which that which is concealed is 'brought forth' into unconcealment.18 This bringing forth is a revealing.19

Imagine now a teasing of the electromagnetic sphere, a calling to reveal, an unconcealing of the properties of the ether. Those unseen, unheard motions that flow around the planet, betwixt and between us, day in and night out. The electromagnetic spectrum. Imagine using this energy, harnessing this flow and capturing it. The space is vast, white with snow, the silences of the magnetic north pole envelop. A magnetised arc set inside a tripod with hanging pendulum sings harmonies unheard before as solar flares register upon the metal as sound.

Canadian artist Gwen Boyle thought Arc might move and so travelled to the isolated science station without sound equipment. Serendipitously, a film crew with excellent sound equipment appeared unannounced and recorded the sounds. The recording baffled scientists, who suggested Arc was a conduit for energy released by the magnetic fields and solar flares present at the installation at that specific time. When run through an oscilloscope, the soundwaves registered from beyond the lowest point of audible sound to beyond the highest point.

Arc has not made sounds in any other location; however, when set up in the Or Gallery, Vancouver, the attached pendulum followed observers around as the looped sound track of Arctic sonances filled the space. 'Her practice of art involves observation and an inquiry into natural phenomenon; she attempts to make visible and tangible those elements which permeate our lives but which we rarely stop to question or wonder at.'20 Heidegger suggests that through the revealing function of modern technology, 'the energy in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformedand is distributed about ever new.'21 In Boyle's work electromagnetic energy is distributed as sound.

Oscillations in time

Women building devices using electricity. Observe three pieces of paper on a wall in front of you. Witness lines of carbon carefully registered on the fibrous surfaces, each individually mapped. Silver positioned to impede movement. Oscillations of electric current flow around the carbon lines and register through the transducer speakers as sounds: tiny, just audible, hums. An efficacious presence. Sounds just heard. Is the hearing a present listening or an imagined past of sound? Emissions from Joyce Hinterding's The Oscillators overflow into the space.22 Sounds of electricity moving through carbon on plant material. Evocations of sounds just beyond the site of hearing.

Sounds emanate, sometimes too small to register on the hardened hearing apparatus of the late 20th Century ear. Levels rising and falling-at times registered by the ear, at other times not heard. The mind thus thinks 'absent'. Is the sound not heard nonexistent? Because we do not hear the sounds of another place, another time, does this mean that those sounds do not exist? Is it only in hearing that sound is given its existence? Is it only in hearing that sound is given substance? What of the silences when sound is not 'heard'?

Is it the ear that 'fails to "hear" the differences between part and part'?23 Paul Carter defines these spaces as spaces in between, silences that resonate with 'sounds in-between'.24 Although Carter's discourse transverses the gaps between cultural linguistics, it seems that in The Oscillators, the 'sounds in-between' may exist within the spaces of communication between the human and the electric machine. This sound/silence is 'provoked by the interval' that exists between the observer and the machine.25 It may appear that the dialogue is one way, that it is The Oscillators alone which 'speak'; however, breath and moisture affect their ejaculation of sound.

Can we infer that this 'sound in-between' in the 'space in-between' 'begins with a desire for dialogue', as Carter suggests? The desire for the observer to 'hear' sound from The Oscillators, and in not hearing, unaware of the silent dialogue occurring between his/her breath/moisture and the sound output, rejects the machine as a hoax if it does not sound. A symbiotic relationship in which the machine 'feels' the presence of the observer, whose only perceived awareness of its functioning is in its emission of sound. This response suggests a lack of awareness of 'the essential co-origination and interdependence of subject and object, self and other'.26

Conclusion

Heidegger's notion of 'bringing-forth brings' electricity and sound 'out of concealment into unconcealment'.27 What does the building of sound apparatuses that require a responsive listening, a hearkening, reflect about the auditory sensitivities in this culture at this time?

At the end of this century, women are exploring their own circuits of electrical inquiry, not as electric light stands, but as orchestrators of electrically charged sound-making instruments. Women sound artists constructing electrical technologies with the purpose of calling forth an ontological listening. Creator of sound spaces and installations generated by subtle electrical movements adjusting to times, spaces, human intervention and presence.

Theirs is a poesy based on an inquiry into electricity, electromagnetism, sound, space and time. A Heideggerian revealing of energy flows hitherto ignored or unheard. Unconcealed in the sound works of Brassil, Boyle and Hinterding. Sound art-the sounds of revealing, of recalling, recollecting that which resonates within and without.