As happens in the summer, I just caught up on several weeks of emails… and noticed today that there were a plethora of “Calls for Papers” for thematic issues of journals and new zines and blogs concerned with Sound Art. Politics was a recurring theme: the pendulum swings away from the works interface with the institution (e.g. “Sound Art Curating 2010 – 2014”) and towards the artists engagement with the world.

Here are four selections:

July 31 “Subversion”
August 1:”The Field” (new zine!)
September 15: “Sound Art & Music: Continuum and Fissure”
October 15: “The Politics of Sonic Art”

More info on each below.

eContact: Experimental Musical Practices and Subversion in Sound – July 31st

The deadline for this issue was May 31. It was extended to July 31st. Deadline is for finished texts, not for proposals. This is an epublication which will launch in August.

Conceptual / Philosophical Questions

• Politically informed content and practices, socially and politically engaged, sound-based creativity.
• The representation of “dissent” in abstract sound practices; or, the conflict between intention and perception of socio-political content.
• Do — can? — concepts such as “radicality”, “provocation” or “subversion” even exist anymore in music and sound?
• Re-appropriating the term “hacking” and other historical corrections.
• Borrowings, appropriations, influences and invasions of rock, punk and other “pop” music in the avant-garde.

Media and Technologies

• The radicalization and subversion of means and technologies.
• Customization, DIY and hacking etc. as levee against the flood of hypercommercialized media.
• Defiant traditionalism, anachronistic and lo-tech practices.
• Performance practice evolution vs. the stagnation of the concert hall model of presentation: the impact and influence of media and technologies.

Performance Practice

• Hacking, cracking, bending and destruction: countering tendencies towards uniformity in sound practices.
• The survival or extinction of Futurism, Dada, Actionism, Fluxus, Noise and Industrial practices.
• Repeatable performance: an anachronistic performance model?
• Expanded and extended performance practice: expressivity, intensity, density and new æsthetics.

[more info]

Issue edited by Karin Weissbruner

 

The Field Art Collective, Launching their new zine

Their website doesn’t list a deadline and says that the zine will be bi-monthly, but they’ve been sending emails with the call listing 8/1 as the deadline. Anyone want to write about ((audience)) or Listen My Heart for the Field?

‘Field’ was set up as a platform to explore Field Recordings, intuitive/contemporary composition and Sound Art. ‘Field’ exists to encourage networking across related fields, workshops, gallery exhibitions, experimental multidisciplinary works, sound walks and to encourage active listening.

[more info]

 

Organised Sound “Sound Art & Music”  – September 15

The central precept of this call for submissions is that sound art and music evolve in a shared world and the joint navigation of this terrain allows new creative approaches to be taken by artists, curators, theorists and participants (listeners).

The current prominence of sound art has been aided by its relation to a visual arts discourse, but even as this visual affiliation has aided sound art’s recognition, making it more visible, it has obstructed the discussion of its sonic materiality and processes and has neglected its musical heritage and those aspects of its practice that recall that history. Consequently, much contemporary sonic output is not appreciated and approached as a critical response to previous and concurrent musical works but is considered mainly in relation to the concerns of visual practice and theory. As a result contemporary sonic works are not theorised through a musical sensibility – understood in relation to a musical expression and musical questions – nor have they the influence to critique and advance traditional musical practices and our critical engagement with them. Rather, what is highlighted in current sound arts discourse are the conceptual and contextual concerns it shares with visual arts history.

The lack of a jointly elaborated critical framework has consequences for how we perform, install, curate, listen to and write about sonic works. It influences and determines our listening strategies and defines our references as well as the way that sonic materiality and symbolic codifications are understood, discussed and practiced.

Potential topics to be considered include:

• Proposals for languages and strategies that develop a joint territory for sound art and music.
• Arguments suggesting why such a joint territory should not be sought.
• Differences in the identities implied by the terms composer and sound artist.
• The influence of electronic media on listening, performance practice and exhibited work.
• Intersections between the listening strategies opened up by sound art and the group actions arising from musical performance (materialities, processes, time and space).
•  Case studies and practice-based research which rigorously examine the conceptual connections between sound art and music (creation, exhibition, performance and curation of works).
• How do notions of sentiment and cerebral conceptuality differ in sound art and music?
• Historically situated reappraisals of music and sound art using tools and insights derived from both areas (for example, re-examinations of electroacoustic music, experimental film, historically informed performance practice, the minuet, sound walks).

Edited by Salome Vogelin & Thomas Gardner

[more info]

 

Leonardo Music Journal “The Politics of Sonic Art” – Proposal Deadline October 15

• The mechanisms by which sonic art can represent and communicate political content without recourse to language.

• Creative activity under precarious conditions in zones of war, repression and censorship.

• Historical and political divisions between the categories of technician, composer, and inventor in electronic music studios and live performance.

• How gendered, racial, cultural, and class privileges operate in technologically driven music.

• The relationship of phonography and sound walks to environmental activism.

• The ecological politics of computers and other of short-lifespan materials (recycling vs. landfills).

• The development of alternative music controllers in response to disabilities.

• Who benefits and who loses in a file-sharing market?

Edited by Nic Collins

[more info]