RE:SOUND 2019

Beyond the Media Reveal: Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying… What?
Jamie Allen

The media arts seem quite concerned with a particular set of binaries: mediums and messages, contexts and contents, forms and functions. These dualities seem endlessly fascinating, as they allow for repeated reassertions of materialist reveals, exposing how aesthetic “illusion” is produced by “real" infrastructure. Media arts and activism are forever disclosing the nervy tensions between signals and their substrates, hiding-in-plain-sight—images are composed of pixels that consume the energy of electrons; moving images laid bare as a mere perceptual delusion of stroboscopic sequence; what we call “sound” entrains near-negligible variations of pressure waves; the Internet is but a crisscrossing of wires at the bottom of Earth’s oceans; you’re carrying a piece of Africa around in your pocket. Once internalised by communities of practice and concern, and taken up by popular imaginaries and culture—that is, once these points are made—what more can we do with these insights, what can come after these important media reveals?

Using examples from the study, theory and practice of infrastructures (made of matter, ideas and people) I would like us to think together about what we think the arts and sciences of media can do to push beyond the materialist and constructivist debunking of media as infrastructure. How might we find ways of addressing the current crises of environment, politics and identity in technologically-saturated cultures that provide something in addition to these now somewhat repetitive, pseudo-novel reveals? And how can we productively question suppositions that such revelation is always inherently interesting or radical? What preliminary or speculative, non-binary and non-representational, strategies and openings appear when we cease presuming and declaring technological-saturation as inescapable? Can hopeful interventions and improvisations occur in the media-technological undercommons?

As someone I love recently said to me, “the things you pay attention to grow”, and the question of what media practices, as arts of attention, cultivate and propagate, is always in need of essential re-examination. What energies and relevances can be recovered in an art, research and pedagogy that are not in advance denatured or economized, but hopeful, supportive, expressive and generative of the presence and attentions needed to allow good things to grow?

[Image: Jamie Allen. Chilean National Museum of Natural History, Santiago, Chile. March 26, 2017.]