Lecture | Sound Matters: One Energy Among Others - Douglas Kahn

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unnamedGertrude, Discipline and Liquid Architecture - Theories and Histories of Sound

Douglas Kahn will give the second lecture in a series presented by Gertrude Contemporary, Discipline and Liquid Architecture festival on the theories and histories of sound.

This exploratory talk will follow from Douglas Kahn’s most recent book, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013). The book, over a decade in the making, is a fundamental reworking in the histories of science, communications, music and the arts to account for the incursion of electromagnetism into culture from the nineteenth century to the present. It covers such figures as Thomas Watson, Henry David, Thoreau, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Joyce Hinterding and Alvin Lucier, Kahn’s former teacher. Investigating the trade between acoustics and electromagnetism in aesthetics and the arts poses questions for new approaches in the arts, ecology and media where sound is but one energy among others.

Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation and Australian Research Council Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW Art & Design, and formerly Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University of California at Davis. Kahn’s writings are central to the fields of sound studies, sound in the arts, media arts history and history of experimental music. His books include Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Avant-garde (MIT Press, 1999), Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde (MIT Press, 1992), Source: Music of the Avant-garde: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966–1973 (University of California Press, 2011), Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts (University of California Press, 2012), and Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013). His current project is A Natural History of Media.

Date: Thursday 28th August 2014, 6pm for 6:15pm start.

Venue: Gertrude Contemporary, 200 Gertrude St, Fitzroy.