about contemporary sound art
What is sound art?
"Sound art is art which uses sound both as its medium (what it is made out of) and its subject (what it is about)." - Tate
Sound art first started being understood as an art form between 1913-1930 when futurist Luigi Russolo built sound machines that were intended to evoke the feeling of warfare. Surrealists and dadaists like John Cage and Marcel Duchamp famously created a long song of silence and singing notes randomly pulled from a hat, respectively. In the 1950s and 1960s, kinetic sculptures and kinetic media entered the frame, with artists like Bill Fontana.
My focus is on contemporary sound art (mostly 2010's and later) as the opportunities for playing with mixed media have never been more vast; the sound art of today embodies the current time we live in, blooms into the future and ricochets into the past. It consists of physical sculpture, sound sculpture, song, video, and literature. It is an indictment of our society and an embrace of our soft, ethereal, and hardened forms. Historically, cataloging has not focused on this type of intermedia and time-based art consistently, but as we surge through the most mixed media saturated time that ever was, with limitless confusion, technological developments and a challenge to historical and current perceptions of reality, sound art embraces this drumbeat, muted then violent, and critically reminds us that we are more human than ever.
"People can be transported into a particular physical situation, and it can totally change their belief about what it is." - Janet Cardiff; photograph below as part of her work: Her Long Black Hair (2004, 2005)
