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Marie Brassard's GLASS EYE I am just as deaf as I am blind. The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important, than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus – the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of men. (Helen Keller)
In my graduate seminar on the history of sound in the arts at the University of Toronto, I begin by asking a simple question: “if you were forced (God forbid!) to make a choice between being deaf or being blind, which would you chose?” It’s a disconcerting question to say the least; one that almost all of us, unlike Helen Keller, will never have ponder seriously. The answer is evenly split: half the class will choose the retina over the eardrum. We then go through a little exercise in which we close our eyes for a minute or so, and discover that while we can stop looking at the world, it’s not so easy to stop listening to it. We have no “earlids” to keep unwanted sounds from entering our sensory apparatus. Sounds invade our very being and attack us from every direction: we exist, almost literally, in a bubble of sounds. Yet the immense role that sound plays in the artistic organization of our experience has only recently become the subject of intense scrutiny among artists and philosophers intent on understanding the mystery of perception.
In the late seventies the French economist Jaques Attali, in a book called Noise: The Political Economy of Music, focussed the debate by categorically stating: for twenty-five centuries Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is not legible but audible. Monsieur Attali was, of course, being provocative; but when you stop to think about it, up until about a hundred years ago, the alphabet and the paintbrush (literature and the visual arts) were the tools artists resorted to when they wanted to copy nature - they looked at the world and made representations of it on cave walls, on papyrus and on paper. The sound of the world remained at best an elusive memory until recording and broadcasting technologies came on the scene. The microphone, the camera, the gramophone and wireless broadcasting meant that we were no longer limited to the written word or the painted scene: we could actually capture the sound of the world, reproduce it and beam it into every household. The retina, which had dominated aesthetic discourse certainly since the invention of perspective in the Renaissance, began yielding some of its power to the eardrum. The impact of recording technologies on the making and appreciation of music, the marriage of image and sound on film, the interaction between artist and machine in performance art, ushered in a paradigm shift in the way we create and consume all forms of art. The Futurists (2008/2009 marks the 100th anniversary of the first Futurist Manifesto) and the Dadaists were quick to grasp the power that these new media were to have on the arts, and within a few years the noise of modernity was heard loud and clear, and not just in concert halls and art galleries, but over the air waves, in street nickelodeons, from loudspeakers in the piazza. The fourth wall in the temple of art so dear to theatre and concert patrons of late 19th century came crashing down, and all sorts of barriers disappeared in the dust that rose from its demolition: between genres, between audience and performers, between public and private spaces.
William Forsythe's CITY OF ABSTRACTS
Celebrated in Futurist serate in Milan, anarchist evenings in the Dadaist Café Voltaire in Zurich or revolutionary poetry readings in the Stray Dog Café in St. Petersburg, the noisy marriage of art and technology proved to be long lasting and very fruitful. Many of the artists participating in Luminato 2008 are but the grandchildren of this marriage: from the interaction of artist and technology in the work of Laurie Anderson, Marie Brassard and Mikel Rouse, to the street art of Sam Rausch, David Michalek or William Forsythe, not to mention the acrobatically interdisciplinary Midsummer Night’s Dream. Today’s technologies (digitazation, the internet) give the artist an almost divine power to make art through the infinite manipulation of visual and audio recordings and to make it instantly available to the global village – futurist’s dream come true! But while the technical sophistication of the digital age is a far cry from simplicity of Edison’s wax cylinder, the artistic spirit ushered in by such primitive devices will be very audible on the streets of Toronto this coming June. Jacques Attali would approve: we now must learn to judge a society more by its sounds, by its art, and by its festivals…by listening to noise we can better understand where the folly of men is leading us, and what hopes it is still possible to have.
photo credits:
Louis Negin in Glass Eye (J.Christian Gagnon)
City of Abstracts (Marion Rossi)
Damiano Pietropaolo
An award-winning radio producer and director, Damiano Pietropaolo is a writer and translator. A former Head of Arts & Entertainment for CBC Radio, he has served on many international juries for radio and sound art. He teaches in the Graduate Drama Centre at the University of Toronto and serves as Artistic Consultant to Luminato.
Click here for the official Luminato 2008 press release.
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