Art Metropole

#14452

Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body

Date

2012

Publisher

Squint Press

Format

Artists' Books

Size

17 × 22.2 cm

Length

281 pp

Genre

Sound Art

Published by Errant Bodies Press (Audio Issues Vol. 5), 296 page, black and white images. Design by fliegende Teilchen, Berlin. Index by Juliana Pivato. ISBN: 978-0-9827439-4-2.

This book delineates a territory of investigation for sound art and its various manifestations through historical, theoretical, polemical and critical analyses of artistic, musical and literary works. In doing so, Migone gives radical definition to an auditory study that includes the complexity of silence and mutism, identity and abjecthood, and language and its stutterances. The recurring site of these stagings is the somatic under all its forms: embodied and disembodied, fragmented and amplified, vocal and mute.

Concrete sites that are investigated include: Antonin Artaud’s writings, Alvin Lucier’s recording “I am sitting in a room”, Erik Satie’s composition “Vexations”, Marina Abramovic’s performance “Rhythm 0”, Adrian Piper’s “Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City”, Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson’s documentary film “First Contact”, and John Cage’s “4’33””.