designing sound in public space in australia: a comparative study based on the australian sound design project's online gallery and database

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-140
Author(s):  
ros bandt

the purpose of this paper is to articulate some of the ways in which australian sound practitioners are already designing sound in the public domain so that current trends and practices can be examined, compared and contrasted. this paper interrogates the new hybrid art form, public sound art, and the design processes associated with it as it occurs in public space in australia. the right to quiet has been defined as a public commons (franklin 1993). public space in australia is becoming increasingly sound designed. this article investigates the variety of approaches by sound artists and practitioners who have installed in public space through a representative sample of works drawn from the australian sound design project's online gallery and article, http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au, a site dedicated to the multimedia publishing of diverse sound designs installed in public space in australia, as well as its international outreach hearing place. works include permanent public and ephemeral sculptures, time-dense computerised sound installations, museum designs, exhibits in airports, art galleries, car parks, digital and interactive media exhibitions, and real-time virtual habitats on and off the web. the degree of interactivity in the sound-designed artworks varies greatly from work to work. stylistic features and design processes are identified in each work and compared and contrasted as a basis for examining the characteristics of the genre as a whole and its impact on the soundscape now and in the future.

2019 ◽  
pp. 96-124
Author(s):  
Alexandra Wilson

This chapter considers opera’s interactions with various forms of popular culture in 1920s Britain. It establishes that ‘cultural purity’ was important to highbrow commentators but not to those with middlebrow taste, and explains that opera, as a hybrid art form, was problematic in this regard. The chapter considers the ways in which the newer form of cinema was perceived to be posing a threat to live opera, but reveals that film and opera interacted in productive ways. It also draws surprising connections between opera and jazz and examines opera’s appearances in popular fiction. The latter part of the chapter is devoted to the relationship between opera recordings and the notion of the bestseller, a problematic new term in the context of the battle of the brows. 1920s concerns about the commercialisation of listening and reading are considered, as are those about new audiences and who had the right to consume culture.


Author(s):  
Sophie Nield

This chapter proposes a theatrical history of the picket line, reading this particular political and performative site of struggle through the lenses of space and spectatorship in order to explore the boundaries of performance and theatricality. Tracking its evolution from the nineteenth century to the Thatcher era, the chapter interrogates the picket line in British industrial and labor history as a site of the interplay of legality and performativity, and argues for the value of reading the political picket through a theatrical lens. A picket line functions as both a practical enactment of rights in space (understood as an occupation of or claim on public space intended to make visible a form of collective identity) and the symbolic expression of workers’ rights to organize and act collectively. Its theatricality resides in this space between symbolic and practical action, in the relationship between presence (a literal placing of bodies in space) and representation as a process of claim-making. The encounter produces affects and behaviors carrying implications beyond the immediate point of conflict: Who owns labor? Who has the right to act collectively? Who holds responsibility for these issues? These issues remain central to debates around labor, conditions, contracts, and rights today, involving the right to unionize, the effective return of zero-hours contracts, and the destruction of communities historically rooted in shared industrial labor.


2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Fursova

Abstract The paper explores emerging contradictions in community development, a subset of non-profit sector, within the context of neoliberalization. I examine non-profit sector as a site that has a potential for articulating counter-hegemonic discourse alternative to neoliberalism. Conversely, non-profit sector itself has been subjected to neoliberal co-optation and restructuring that resulted in restricted autonomy of the sector and decreased capacity to advocate for progressive social change. Drawing on my experience as a community engagement worker in one of Toronto's neighbourhood improvement areas, I problematize community development, posing questions about the role of the non-profit agencies in the production of specific socio-economic configurations that may, albeit inadvertently, support neoliberal discourse. Through an example of local community campaign for increased access to public space and services, I highlight options to enhance counter-hegemonic potential of community development as a critical practice aimed at advancing the commons.


Author(s):  
Alison Brysk

In Chapter 7, we profile the global pattern of sexual violence. We will consider conflict rape and transitional justice response in Peru and Colombia, along with the plight of women displaced by conflict from Syria and Central America, and limited international policy response. State-sponsored sexual violence and popular resistance to reclaim public space will be chronicled in Egypt as well as Mexico. We will track intensifying public sexual assault amid social crisis in Turkey, South Africa, and India, which has been met by a wide range of public protest, legal reform, and policy change. For a contrasting experience of the privatization of sexual assault in developed democracies, we will trace campus, workplace, and military rape in the United States.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hegarty

The regulation of public space is generative of new approaches to gender nonconformity. In 1968 in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, a group of people who identified as wadam—a new term made by combining parts of Indonesian words denoting “femininity” and “masculinity”—made a claim to the city's governor that they had the right to appear in public space. This article illustrates the paradoxical achievement of obtaining recognition on terms constituted through public nuisance regulations governing access to and movement through space. The origins and diffuse effects of recognition achieved by those who identified as wadam and, a decade later, waria facilitated the partial recognition of a status that was legal but nonconforming. This possibility emerged out of city-level innovations and historical conceptualizations of the body in Indonesia. Attending to the way that gender nonconformity was folded into existing methods of codifying space at the scale of the city reflects a broader anxiety over who can enter public space and on what basis. Considering a concern for struggles to contend with nonconformity on spatial grounds at the level of the city encourages an alternative perspective on the emergence of gender and sexual morality as a definitive feature of national belonging in Indonesia and elsewhere.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
G. DOUGLAS BARRETT

Abstract This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of ‘the contemporary’ along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art – a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process – while contemporary music struggles with its status as a non-conceptual art form that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. The article also considers the category of sound art and discusses some of the ways it, too, is at odds with contemporary art's generic and post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contemporaneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the historical sense of the term articulated in art theory. As an alternative to these categories, I propose ‘musical contemporary art’ to describe practices that depart in consequential ways from new/contemporary music and sound art.


10.1068/a3237 ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 599-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A Gagen

At the turn of the 20th century, children's play came under new and heightened scrutiny by urban reformers. As conditions in US cities threatened traditional notions of order, reformers sought new ways to direct urban-social development. In this paper I explore playground reform as an institutional response that aimed to produce and promote ideal gender identities in children. Supervised summer playgrounds were established across the United States as a means of drawing children off the street and into a corrective environment. Drawing from literature published by the Playground Association of America and a case study of playground management in Cambridge, MA, I explore playground training as a means of constructing gender identities in and through public space. Playground reformers asserted, drawing from child development theory, that the child's body was a conduit through which ‘inner’ identity surfaced. The child's body became a site through which gender identities could be both monitored and produced, compelling reformers to locate playgrounds in public, visible settings. Reformers' conviction that exposing girls to public vision threatened their development motivated a series of spatial restrictions. Whereas boys were unambiguously displayed to public audiences, girls' playgrounds were organised to accommodate this fear. Playground reformers' shrewd spatial tactics exemplify the ways in which institutional authorities conceive of and deploy space toward the construction of identity.


2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Batchelor

Public art invariably involves the drawing of individuals into the roles of audience and participant by virtue of it being in the public domain – in public places where those individuals are getting on with their everyday lives. As such, a large proportion of the ‘audience’ is an unwitting one, subjected to the art rather than subscribing to it. This is equally true of public sound art, where response to an intervention may vary from engagement to non-engagement to indifference to unawareness, along with a variety of transitional states between. This essay seeks to investigate this ambiguous territory in public sound art, proposing it both as an area rich in possibility for creative exploration and as a means by which artists may reveal and encourage sensitivity to the existing characteristics of a site (thus accommodating the pursuit of agendas relating to acoustic ecology). In particular it investigates and presents a case for the use of lowercase strategies in sound art as ways in which the public might be invited into a dialogue with works (invitation rather than imposition) and thus empowered as partakers of public sound art.


2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (06) ◽  
pp. 1109-1122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xijun Wang ◽  
Aihua Zhang ◽  
Hui Sun ◽  
Ping Wang

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), an alternative medicine, focuses on the treatment of human disease via the integrity of the close relationship between body and syndrome analysis. It remains a form of primary care in most Asian countries and its characteristics showcase the great advantages of personalized medicine. Although this approach to disease diagnosis, prognosis and treatment has served the medical establishment well for thousands of years, it has serious shortcomings in the era of modern medicine that stem from its reliance on reductionist principles of experimentation and analysis. In this way, systems biology offers the potential to personalize medicine, facilitating the provision of the right care to the right patient at the right time. We expect that systems biology will have a major impact on future personalized therapeutic approaches which herald the future of medicine. Here we summarize current trends and critically review the potential limitations and future prospects of such treatments. Some characteristic examples are presented to highlight the application of this groundbreaking platform to personalized TCM as well as some of the necessary milestones for moving systems biology of a state-of-the-art nature into mainstream health care.


Author(s):  
Dylan On

As digital technology progresses, it increasingly mediates human interaction. Simple discussion has shifted from occurring only in person to being mediated by telephone, texting, video calling, Twitter, Facebook and a myriad of other technologies and services. Likewise, theatre has been undergoing a similar shift from an art form that only occurs 'in person' to one in which technology often mediates presence. In his book Liveness, Philip Auslander traces the roots of digital mediation back to the advent of television and the resulting cycle of reinterpretation, or remediation as it is termed by Bolter and Grusin, of different art mediums within one another. Innovative Canadian artists Robert Lepage and Kim Collier are currently engaging in the remediation of traditional art mediums on the stage by taking a distinctly cinematic approach to theatre. This study intends to evaluate the remediation of these mediums both in the theatre and in live performances such as sporting events. It will then consider current trends in integrating interactive ‘new’ media into live and pre-recorded events, and how these ‘new’ media may already be manifesting themselves elsewhere via remediation. This discussion will give special consideration to immersive theatre, in which audiences are free to navigate theatrical space autonomously and observe as they wish. Key questions to be considered include: What are the tools of mediation, and what are their effects? How might digital (re)mediation be reinventing the way we tell and receive stories in the theatre? In what ways can the theatre further reinterpret ‘new’ interactive media?


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document