La Parole à l’œuvre (Media & messages) — Échos Système — Le Crédac, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry — Lecture — Slash Paris

Past: Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Echoes System

An idea of sound in contemporary art

This lecture series looks to explore different uses of sound and the ways it is manifested in the field of contemporary art. Viewed here as a prism beyond the simple medium itself, sound covers a broad spectrum that ranges from noise to silence with a number of phenomena in between, including speech and music, as well as a multitude of situations, images, and forms that try to capture and occasionally depict immateriality, or reinvest certain cultural codes that can be associated with it.

Since John Cage, Max Neuhaus, and La Monte Young, many other artists such as Janet Cardiff or Susan Phillipsz have sought to understand perception in terms of a renewed relationship with space and time, to question and shift our experience of listening. That act is manifested notably through singular forms of address that partake of oral transmission and mechanisms of broadcast and reception that focus especially on performance and more broadly the notion of live presentation, or the logics of redeploying an original work and translation. Favorable to certain kinds of encounters—with the body, voice, tone, narrative, or place, etc.—these contexts sketch out a network of resonances, versions and other echoes in which interpretation plays an essential role, for who or what produces a work of art, as it does for those to whom the work is directed.

Lecture 2/4

La Parole à l’œuvre (Media & messages)

By guaranteeing—between commentary and narrative—how the work of art and its live, recorded, or broken-up (tele)transmission appears, speech is examined here through different channels of dissemination of the voice and other media tools—from the human body to radio to the audioguide—as well as through the ways these are able to “affect” the work of art and its reception, when borrowed or even reappropriated by certain artists.