Auditory Environments

Posted by admin on March 11th, 2008 filed in art, theory

Here is a copy of the paper I gave at the Auditory Environments seminar at Culture Lab yesterday.
Due to its heavily theoretical orientation the paper plummeted into obscurity, but at least some of the ideas I had wanted to discuss came out in the pub after the evening concert.

This is a Strange Theatre:
Sonorous Individuation and Interactive Aural Architectures

This paper will discuss the emergence, primarily through sound, of performative fields or sites. This focus is due to my own interests as a practitioner in interactive sound installations, in particular the work of people such as Edwin van der Heide and the Swedish sound artist Ann Rosen. In Spatial Sounds by Edwin van der Heide and Marnix de Nijs a speaker rotates around a fixed leg, blasting intense sound into the space and bodies of visitors. Using an ultrasound sensor and a Max program the machine is also able to locate bodies in space in order to interact with them in an incredibly dynamic manner. In this piece by Ann Rosen entitled Spatial Silences a low noise is projected from the speakers mounted on the scaffold. A ‘silent’ space moves around the space, a silence which is more like a hole cut out of the noise which otherwise fills the space. The aim of this latter piece is to locate the silent space or hole, which is what is going on in this image. Throughout this paper I will be drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, tracing an understanding of sound that can be found in his later work with Guattari back to his texts written in 1967 and ‘68.

The afore mentioned interactive works, by virtue of their interactive and technical infrastructure, trace out immediate and inviting paths into an interactive experience of sound as the dramatizing force of a performative space or environment (I’ll come back to exactly what is meant by ‘dramatization’ later). However, the more general approach taken in this paper to sound as a dynamic material hopefully makes what follows applicable to auditoriums in the broadest possible sense.

I wish to start where sound is not limited its occurrence within or through space but as space, and therefore not within theatre but as constituting a theatre. In doing so we are dealing with sound from the ground up. In finding a resonance sound activates or energises and simultaneously constructs space and forms territories. As an energetic material for the construction of space we might also think of sound in an architectural sense and, therefore, as constituting a theatre architecture with its own history of the engineering of perception. This sonorous theatre or theatre of sonorities, is, as Deleuze puts it, “…is a strange theatre…

… comprised of pure determinations, agitating time and space, directly affecting the soul, whose actors are larva – Artaud’s name for this theatre was cruelty (Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Method of Dramatization’, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 98).

As in Artaud’s theatre, this is a theatre that pile-drives sounds, trampling them underfoot, as he puts it in The Theatre and its Double, it identifies as its ground a rumbling sonority or murmur. Emerging from this ground, from noise, is sound as an intensive occupying force; while it remains subject to the conditioning of what we might call aural architectures – for example, the physical properties of an auditorium in the broadest sense – it nevertheless constitutes its own space, it is site-specific in-itself, it is sound as a para-site. Such a sonorous site is reliant upon a host that it transforms, disorganizes and reorganizes. Such a site bares the potentials of performativity where performance is seen as synonymous with a kind of improvisation, and improvisation as an attempt to make sense of or negotiate an environment that overwhelms the individual in an encounter. Performance is thus figured as, or contributing to, a process of individuation, the emergence of individuals or subjects, as an improvised and performative response to subjection to intensity. In overwhelming or enveloping, sound conditions performance. Its presence, which can be usefully thought of as extimate, simultaneously inside and out, within and without body, is dynamic, it is a distorter of space and a catalyst of movement. It is in this sense that sound, as a distorting catalyst, can mark the emergence of a kind of theatre, as spatio-temporal dynamic providing the method of its dramatization.

In a paper from around 1967, Deleuze outlines what he means by spatio-temporal dynamisms, and their role in what he refers to as dramatization. Here I present an edited list:

Spatio-temporal dynamisms ‘create particular spaces and times… they entail or designate a subject, though a “larval” or “embryonic” subject… they constitute a special theatre… they express Ideas… It is through all these different aspects that spatio-temporal dynamisms figure the movement of dramatization’ (The Method of Dramatization, 94).

The Idea, mentioned in this quote is not to be thought of in strictly conceptual terms but, as Deleuze is at pains to express throughout much of his early work, as concrete and in some sense elementary. For the purpose of this presentation we can treat the Idea, as it appears in the previous quote, as necessarily implicated in what Deleuze refers to as a problematic field, or at least as brushing up against it, as the blurred distinction between the two is beyond the needs and scope of this paper. The theatre I am trying to locate in sound, with regard to the framework it expresses, even where this might be identified as noise, finds adequate elaboration in the notion of the problematic field. The problematic field, as we find it in Difference and Repetition, is on the side of events and affects, it is a heterogeneous complex of elements, it takes the form of a multiplicity. In order to identify this theatre of sonorities as such we must identify in sound a problematic field.

Dramatization is, in a sense, the conditioning and compounding of an actual and energetic space or system. Through the connection and reconnection of distinct elements according to a dynamic mode of relation, dramatization establishes the framework of a performative or problematic field. The theatrical form of the field emerges through the dramatization of space which gives rise to individuating performances.

Sound, as a spatio-temporal dynamism, re-connects and restructures space along the contours and in the resonances of its own movements, movements which delimit an auditory and sensory environment. It is this environment which constitutes our theatre, a theatre of production. The emergence of such a theatre can be heard, felt and thought as a contraction, condensation or intensification of singularities, of spatial characteristics, resonances, vibrations and distortions, or perhaps equally as an explosive sound, cutting or tearing a hole in space. In either case, such an event results in an ephemeral site or architecture which explodes, or perhaps seeps slowly, into a presupposed field, site or situation. Such an ephemeral and aural architecture constitutes the emergence of a theatre as a vibrating para-site. At the end of such an occupation the qualities of the preceding site or host may spring back into being, yet the host of such a parasitic sound cannot be limited to technical infrastructure or pre-existing architectural framework, but must include the matter of all bodies in which it resonates. Sound spatialization must not be thought of as strictly extensive, as occurring out there in space, but as intensive and embodied, that is, not only an extensive projection of gesture into space, but also an intensive conditioning of gesture. The reciprocal determination of intensive and extensive space can be seen in the elaboration of a biological theatre that runs throughout Difference and Repetition:

The world itself is an egg, but the egg itself is a theatre: a staged theatre in which the roles dominate the actors, the spaces dominate the roles and the Ideas dominate the spaces… spatial dramatisation is played out on several levels: in the constitution of an internal space, but also in the manner in which that space extends into the external extensity, occupying a region of it… A living being is not only defined genetically, by the dynamisms which determine its internal milieu, but also ecologically, by the external movements which preside over its distribution within an extensity (Difference and Repetition, 269).

Spatialization techniques perform a space, but a space that cuts into and runs through the body: spatialization in this sense is also the performance of intensive spatium as much as extensive or ecological space. Sound makes an imprint upon the body as there can be no shutting out of its vibrations, it pierces and resounds within the organism. We find a similar description in Deleuze’s later work with Guattari that identifies the properties of sound I am attempting to pinpoint here, the difference being that, once the biological parallels of his earlier work have subsided a little, individuation is figured more strongly as a process that, as Alberto Toscano has put it, traverses ‘already constituted individuals, drawing them towards impersonal becomings’ (The Theatre of Production, 176) a process which draws on deterritorialization, the stripping down or opening out towards difference and change:

Sound owes this power not to signifying or “communicational” values… nor to physical properties, but to a phylogenetic line, a machinic phylum that operates in sound and makes it a cutting edge of deterritorialization. But this does not happen without great ambiguity: sound invades us, impels us, drags us, transpierces us (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 383).

Subject to the intensity dramatized in sound, the host bears an impression or a trace marking a sonorous or resonant occupation, the mark of a sound that writes upon and reconfigures the listening body. With sufficient intensity sound reconfigures listening and therefore the perceptive complex or apparatus and we begin once again not only to tune the world but equally to be tuned by it.