'The Temporary: 01 - Architectures of Change'

I have been independently organising the curatorial and research project of APO33, which I founded in 1997, in Nantes. The Association defends the sound arts and experimental intermedia practices by providing space for research, pedagogy and public presentation of these practices. I am applying for this post-doctoral position because I find the project has a strong resonance with my own artistic practice and academic research. I would like to have the opportunity to extend my own research on urban sound environments, through this collaboration and in the context of Sonorous cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism. It would also be important for my own academic research trajectory and artistic development.

2009

This paper examines urban site-specific sound installations, as an artistic expression that integrates other disciplines such as sociology and urbanism in the practice and theory of art. It also explores the impact these soundworks produce not only on the physical city but also on the role that citizens play in it. I propose a critical and theoretical approach to this field of sonic arts from the main topics that along time artists have been concerned for in their artwork: on the one hand the relationship between the artwork and the spectator, and on the other the analysis and reasoning of the space through the work of art. In considering site-specific sound installation from these two starting points, the echoes of the previous non-sonorous artistic tradition, especially that closest to its advent in the mid-sixties are noticeable. For this reason, together to their sonorous specificity, other arguments, such as their sociological, urban and phenomenological implications, are rathe...

In different ways, works of art conceived for specific places lead us to consider the audience’s presence, or in a wider sense, the presence of the individual, within the space of the work. For this reason, in this chapter I analyse sound installations in urban environments using a historical and multidisciplinary approach, and focusing on their reception by the “city-citizen” (a term that recognizes the reciprocal influence of the dynamic space of the city and its urban inhabitants). When site-specific artworks include sound as a material, they also incorporate or reinforce ideas of temporality, simultaneity and dynamism and these same qualities are inherent to the modern city. Drawing on 1960s research by urban planner Kevin Lynch, I will discuss the impact of urban sound installations by Max Neuhaus, Bernard Leitner, Bill Fontana and Bruce Nauman. I will argue that all these artists create works that, by immersing the citizen in sound, change and enrich his or her perception of the city.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 18, No. 3. , 2013

Architecture and the city offer natural subjects to the increasingly secure field of noise and sound studies. Noise and noises inflect the experience of the urbanite in cities of all scales, lending aural substance to what Georg Simmel famously described as 'the intensification of emotional life'. 1 For architecture, noise is a matter of acoustics, of relational experience, of the often blurred distinction between individual, social and institutional zones. Numerous studies have sought to account for the variety and effect upon social and cultural environments of what R. Murray

This paper examines urban site-specific sound installations, as an artistic expression that integrates other disciplines such as sociology and urbanism in the practice and theory of art. It also explores the impact these soundworks produce not only on the physical city but also on the role that citizens play in it. I propose a critical and theoretical approach to this field of sonic arts from the main topics that along time artists have been concerned for in their artwork: on the one hand the relationship between the artwork and the spectator, and on the other the analysis and reasoning of the space through the work of art. In considering site-specific sound installation from these two starting points, the echoes of the previous non-sonorous artistic tradition, especially that closest to its advent in the mid-sixties are noticeable. For this reason, together to their sonorous specificity, other arguments, such as their sociological, urban and phenomenological implications, are rather suggested in this discussion to come up to the expanded and renewed concept of total art integrated within the dynamics of the city.

The Senses & Society, 2021

Public parks in urban China have become places where elder and middle-aged city-dwellers join in varied group activities such as choral singing, square-dancing, or traditional and revolutionary opera, to name but a few. While these places have been analyzed as a setting for a rich, everyday public life, the sonic dimension of park life has been relatively unexplored. Based on recent ethno-graphic accounts of encounters and performances in Beijing's public parks, this article explores these practices as an intervention in the daily sonic order of the city, an active production of the textures of the everyday through "heat and noise" (re'nao). Using voices and technologies to perform in public, the display of sounds by park-goers who experienced the Cultural Revolution echoes the loud-ness of those days while creating temporal assemblages of their 20 own. Simultaneously, they reshape the patterns of co-presence and engagements among strangers, allowing for convivial interactions. Constitutive of the everyday, the tension between familiarity and strangeness, between routine and playfulness, is thus cultivated through "the sensorial production of the social" in ways that shape a pleasurable urban experience.

The SAGE Handbook of Globalization Edited by M. Steger, P. Battersby, J. Siracusa, Sage Publications, London. , 2014

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019

Existing geographical research on sound has largely focused on the relationship between music and place. The actual places of music-concert halls, opera houses, and other listening and performance spaces-have remained an empirical lacuna. Concert halls are influential agents over urban space. They are not only flashpoints of urban culture, they also technologically mold urban space and transform our acoustic experience of the city. In this article, I use the modern concert hall as a conceptual and empirical window on the world to examine the relationship between sound, modernity, and urban space. The Berlin Philharmonie, designed by the German architect Hans Scharoun and completed in 1963, is considered one of the most influential modern concert halls and a precursor to the currently prevalent vineyard-style design. It is suggested that Scharoun's radically democratic spatial design is significantly different from the contemporary boosterism of iconic halls and the widening scope of a late-modern economy of experiential intensity. A close reading of Scharoun's modernist experiments with sound in postwar Berlin highlights the underexplored theoretical and political tensions around what we might refer to as acoustic modernism.