Sound Art: The First 100 Years of an Aggressively Expanding Artform

"A brief history of sound art is, in a nutshell, a history of sonic forms of expression that throughout the twentieth century can be traced within music, the visual arts, and contemporary dance, as well as in performance art, conceptual art, and media art. Attempts to capture sound art as a detached and isolated art form or artistic phenomenon have been made, but this is definitely not the approach of this handbook. On the contrary, we conceptualize sound art as a persistent and expanding art form, that is entangled with a broad diversity of genres and cultural phenomena—through its sound practices. Sound art today both stimulates and builds, challenges and destructs, reinvents and subverts institutions. It is concrete and physical, material and corporeal—calling for reflection, speculation, and abstraction to surprisingly excessive degrees. Sound art is rooted in a longer history and culture, but incessantly seeks a critical politicizing, decolonializing, and rethinking of the same. A history of sound art can, of course, be shaped in various ways depending on the argument or approach one wishes to frame. In order to support our argument we stress a canon of works and approaches that consider technology, performativity, social and political awareness, and utopia and dystopia. These are, in our understanding the main reasons why today it still holds true to claim: Sound art is generative.

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With this handbook we hope ... to provide a contemporary journey in postapocalyptic times across the grid of sensibilities, thinking, making, and institutionalizing that can serve artists, curators, activists, developers, inventors, listeners, researchers, and aficionados as well. May sound art further expand!"