MATERIALIST MEDIA AS THEORY AND PRACTICE

Themes usefully connecting theoretical approaches to material systems and electromechanical sound art also emerge from the field of media archaeology and related traditions that might usefully be thought of as ‘materialist media theory’. Jussi Parikka, who has done much to define the field of media archaeology in recent years, points out its connections to the work of Latour, as well as a to a line of media theorists including Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin and Fredric Kittler who have focussed on the effects of technologies and hardware within a media context which is more typically associated with a cultural world of signs, messages and meanings. Parikka identifies that this ‘turn’ to materiality through attention paid to the hardware and the wiring of media networks at all levels can be seen as a response to the ‘perceived immateriality brought by digital culture, and by what postmodern theories flagged as the abstraction and immaterialisation of cultural reality’ (Parikka 2012: 84). In an attempt to balance this glossy, malleable, digitised version of culture, the materialist media sensibility highlights the wax cylinders, the glass plates, the copper, the gutta-percha, the silicon, the

transistors and the microprocessors of media tools throughout history, drawing attention to the particular pull that each exerts on a complex web of media relations. There is much more that could be said regarding the specific approaches and methods of media archaeology, which also has a particular interest in seeking out lost and forgotten possibilities and narratives within a material history of media, but two points from the more general field are worth highlighting with regards electromechanical sound art.

These are the notions of ‘decent’, and of ‘material noise’ both of which owe much to media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1999).

‘Decent’ in this context can be understood simply as a theoretical and practical

disassembly of the media machine, an investigation of its inner hardware workings and a

recognition of how they may relate to the ‘higher’ and softer levels and workings of signals, signs and meanings resulting from human interaction with such a machine in use. Following Kittler (1995), the computer is a rich example through which to test the idea of ‘decent’ where an apparently disembodied stream of images and sounds

presents a rich flow of cultural experience, meaning, information and communication. All of this, however, is deeply embedded in hardware contexts such as the high speed shifting of voltage differentials, semiconductor logic gates, server rooms, capacitors and bits of silicon, the specific arrangement and nature of which defines the symbols and meanings being thrown up to the user level. Parikka connects such an approach with Kittler as well as with Michael Foucault’s ideas relating to the archive of knowledge (see Parikka 2011: 3, 2012: 81, 83, 89 and ch4).

The idea of decent is particularly relevant to pieces of electromechanical sound art such as Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire and Tudor’s Rainforest where the opening up, disassembly and reworking of the loudspeaker in hardware terms is akin to an

investigation and questioning of the material relations within a standard piece of sound technology. Also, Tudor’s sustained interest and practice relating to handmade electronic audio devices, since the mid 60s, for works such as Rainforest can be understood in terms of decent. The soldering composer’s approach reflects a similar sensibility to that which Parikka (2012) explores in regards to circuit bending, the creative practice of rewiring and hacking pre-existing commercially available technologies for new and interesting results. Whilst circuit bending in 2012 may carry a more overtly political tone relating to mass produced and non-serviceable consumer electronic technologies, Tudor and other soldering composers since the 1960s intuitively recognised that the cultural practice of creative sound making is, in part, hard wired into technology. They took this as a call to pick up a soldering iron, descend inside technology and partake in

electronics practice as part of their music making. Once inside the electronics, Tudor exhibits further materialist tendencies. John Driscoll (2004) describes Tudor’s fascination with electronic components taking on their own personalities and suggesting musical direction (Driscoll and Rogalsky 2004: 29), while elsewhere he is quoted describing electronic components as his ‘friends’, who he chooses not to control but allows to

‘release what’s there’ (Tudor quoted in Kuivila 2004: 21). As Jane Bennett (2010) points out, this anthropomorphising is valuable in avoiding a human centred position because

‘oddly enough it works against anthropocentrism: a chord is struck between human and

thing and [people] are no longer above or outside a nonhuman “environment”’ (Bennett 2010: 120).

The idea of ‘material noise’ also owes much to Kittler’s brand of media theory (see Parikka 2011a: ch12, Cox 2011: 154, Henriques 2003 and Kittler 1999). A good way to understand the proposition is to consider Shannon’s model of communication (see figure 2.11, chapter 2) where an information source is transmitted to a received destination by way of a communication channel represented in this original version of the model by the smaller empty square in the centre. This channel through which the information passes belongs to the real, material world. In terms of sound this could be the air through which sound waves travel or the copper and electronic components through which an electrical analogue of a sound wave is conducted. It is during this materially embedded part of the journey that noise can infiltrate a signal, and the information being communicated.

Whether it be a conversation on a windy day, a telephone line with a poor connection or a gramophone record with a crackly surface, noise can be introduced through real world material influence, bringing with it non-signifying, audible artefacts.

In Gramophone, Film Typewriter (1999) this thinking prompted Kittler to specially align audio recording with a status of ‘the real’ where, unlike the symbolic, written account of language, afforded by the typewriter, the whole audible spectrum is captured including non-signifying elements such as coughs, stutters, pops, hiss, hum, crackle and even the mechanical noise of the recording equipment itself. The theory reflects usefully on a range of sound art activities from Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises (1913) to activities including the purposeful cracking, scratching and bending of various types of physical media such as vinyl and compact discs for creative effect (see Kelly 2009). Noise, as Cox (2009) points out has a long and intimate connection with twentieth century

experimental music and sonic art. The idea of the insertion of noisy material into a clean signal path however is particularly well illustrated by the electromechanical approaches described here that subvert the operation of the loudspeaker by adding materials to its mechanism. Tudor’s sculptural speakers of Rainforest are the key example here but also, as has been shown, other more recent works such as the Rumentarium project, Wilson’s miraculous agitations and Bosch and Simons’ Krachtgever can all be viewed as fitting a similar model. Choosing to specifically work with customised complexes of hard resonant materials as the only means through which soft electrical signals, software and

information technology can exert its will upon the world is a creative practice that speaks of material noise being introduced to a signal path.

3.4 SUMMARY

The theoretical positions considered have reflected usefully on electromechanical sound art in various closely related ways, which will be briefly summarised. Firstly, the

mysterious and closed world of objects is, in part, made accessible and perceptible through the sounding qualities brought about by the kinetic interactions and processes of electromechanical sound art; sound is one way of appreciating and gaining access to objects and their material make up. Interactions, relations and processes (kinetic or otherwise), however, can also be seen as actually constituting what makes those objects, bringing them into being through sounding, relational, material networks. These positions, underpinned by OOO and ANT respectively, reflect the tensions already identified

between what has been termed here a ‘closed system aesthetic’ and a more open systems sensibility. Secondly, following Law (2010) in particular and the ANT stance in general it is possible to uncover a view of scientific practice that presents it as

remarkably similar to some process-orientated experimental music and art practices in terms of a reliance on materials, process and relations. The difference is that in science there exists an expectation that outcomes will be fixed and repeatable (reflecting Laws empiricist assumptions on reality) whilst in experimental music and art there is an acceptance that outcomes will be unpredictable and ever changing. These differences in expectation reflect the different epistemological positions described by Cox and Bogost: cultural relativism on the one hand and scientific naturalism on the other.

Seeking out a theoretical territory that avoids these two theoretical polar opposites seems especially appropriate for a sound art that directly appropriates scientific experiments, material objects and engineering technologies as its raw materials for creative and cultural endeavour.

Meanwhile these concerns are found to exist within media technologies, where sound, objects, materials and relations are already at play. It follows that disassembling, reassembling and descending inside these media technologies has been a fruitful starting point for creative endeavour since at least the 1960s, and continues to be so today. One particular electromechanical technique of this nature follows a model of reworking the loudspeaker, introducing material noise into the signal path in a very direct

and literal way. This type of creative approach intuitively recognises that even in electrified and digitised contexts, cultural and aesthetic experience emerges from a hardware level of materials. These various positions have been presented under the guise of theory although it becomes evident that within them there exists an emphasis on practice and process alongside themes of relations, systems and materiality. This

establishes a useful context from which to consider the practice based research method of this project, in the following chapter.

4. METHOD