This article examines the history of sonification in sound art, focusing on the role that data play in influencing artistic creation and aesthetic experience. The author discusses sonified data artworks that go beyond the simple representation of information and that offer critiques of what Horkheimer and Adorno described as the dehumanizing notion of equivalence at the heart of the bureaucratic, capitalist economy. Concluding with a discussion of his installation Seismology as Metaphor for Empathy (2012), the author suggests that representing data through sound can engender powerful affective responses to the cold abstraction of information.
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Bodies constantly emit and receive sensorial stimulation. Having this feedback loop of sensation interrupted can feel profoundly disorienting, even smothering and threatening, as the author discovered when he first visited an anechoic chamber—a soundproof room in which acoustic reflections are virtually absent. This essay is a meditation on the role that sound, vibration, and sensation play in allowing us to feel at home in the world. To work through this proposition, Akiyama stages an imaginary performance event in the anechoic chamber at IRCAM (an institute for the study of sonic art and technology in Paris). This fictitious event brings together a group of expert listeners, including Alvin Lucier, one of the leading figures in conceptual sound art; Maryanne Amacher, a pioneering sound artist, composer, and psychoacoustics researcher; Daniel Kish, the found of World Access for the Blind and a noted expert in human echolocation; and Arthur Russell, a composer and producer who was at the vanguard of the New York downtown music scene in the 1980s, until his tragic, early death from AIDS. Each figure, different in their expertise and capacities, brings one closer to the realization that one’s ability to feel at home in the world is inextricably linked to our sensorial entanglement with our surroundings.
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