Involving Experiences: Audiencing and Co-reception inPleasure Garden

Abstract

This article takes a site-specific, interactive sound installation called Pleasure Garden as a space for thinking about contemporary forms of musical experience. I develop a relational account of the ‘co-reception’ of Pleasure Garden, not centred on listening subjects, but distributed across audience members, artists, researchers and the more-than-human assemblage of the installation itself. I also discuss the effects of several overlapping cultures of ‘audiencing’ associated with Western art music, sound art and other forms of cultural experience – variously individualistic, distracted and participatory – characteristic of late capitalism. Tracing how Pleasure Garden both responded to and was interrupted by these wider forces, I take this case as suggestive of a deep ambivalence: that musical experience is at once powerfully conditioned and generatively uncertain. Throughout the article, problems of method, interpretation and representation intertwine, raising questions about how to study forms of musical experience that evade conventional ethnographic enquiry.

Sound and More-than-Human Sociality in Catherine Clover’sOh! Ah ah pree trra trra

“…Sound comes as an intimation from these larger social worlds not as a message sent with intention, but as information to which we might attend. This paradox only extends problematics, extensively discussed elsewhere, associated with human-centred participatory art, including around miscommunication, coercion, exclusion, and the question of whether participation (or 'engagement') is an ethical 'good' or something much more ambivalent (Bishop 2012, Reason 2015, Barney, Coleman, Ross, Sterne and Tembeck 2016, Sedgman 2017, Browning 2020a. If consideration of more-thanhuman sociality can add anything to these debates it is perhaps by foregrounding the contingent and speculative dimension of socially-engaged art, indeed of sociality in general.…”