This is a Strange Theatre

Posted by admin on March 4th, 2008 filed in I and I, theory

I’ll be giving a paper at Culture Lab, Newcastle University on Monday (10th) as part of the Auditory Environments conference series. This will be given alongside presentations by Ross Brown. Trevor Wishart, Sally Jane Norman and many others. Further information can be found here.

Below is the abstract for the paper I’ll be giving. It is currently in tatters, strewn throughout note books, but once its compiled into something that hopefully makes sense I’ll post it up here in one form or another.

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

The role of sound in the constitution of interactive auditory environments and the emergence of performative fields is to be brought into question alongside its impact upon the behaviour of subjects occupying such spaces. Within this context, sound is to be considered as the driving or dramatizing force of aural and ephemeral architectures. Sound occurs within space and as the creation of a space by distorting and transforming the space it occupies. This occupation is, of course, also temporal, enabling us to speak of sound in a manner consistent with the Deleuzean notion of spatio-temporal dynamisms. This notion extends the architectural understanding of sound into a practice of thinking, experiencing and working with sound as a performative field and theatre architecture. It is the theoretical approach taken in this paper that draws out the theatrical nature of sound; this theatricality should not necessarily be understood as the application of sound within theatre proper, but the dynamic force of sound as a catalyst for performative individuation. Such an understanding of individuation entails the reciprocal determination of subject and environment through performative engagements.

These theoretical concerns are to be addressed in relation to the work of a number of artists whose practice focuses on interactive engagements with auditory environments in traditional gallery based installations as well as more distributed spaces.