Les Immatériaux: a tour of the exhibition with headphones

Educational Theory, 2025

Sometimes we hear music (when we play it or hear it, whether live or recorded) and experience is felt as a singular event. In those moments we find ourselves in an existential situation that, because it is singular (rare, unique, unintended), reveals the formative power of an aesthetic experience of listening to music, what we might call learning how to be poetic.Here, Eduardo Duarte Bono explores how engaging with Jean-Luc Nancy can enable us to deepen our appreciation for music’s aesthetic education. Specifically, Nancy’s category of” resonant subjectivity” describes the existential place where this education is occurring during those singular experiences with music, what Nancy describes as ”‘to be all ears’ [être à l’écoute], to be listening.” As a way of amplifying Nancy’s writing on listening to music, Duarte Bono takes up three distinct cases in this paper: the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, Pablo Picasso’s sculpture Guitar, and Ralph Ellison’s musings on living with music as a writer.

2015

In 1985, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated a groundbreaking exhibition called Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition showed how telecommunication technologies were beginning to impact every aspect of life. At the same time, it was a material demonstration of what Lyotard called the post-modern condition. This book features a previously unpublished report by Jean-François Lyotard on the conception of Les Immatériaux and its relation to postmodernity. Reviewing the historical significance of the exhibition, his text is accompanied by twelve contemporary meditations. The philosophers, art historians, and artists analyse this important moment in the history of media and theory, and reflect on the new material conditions brought about by digital technologies in the last 30 years. Texts by Daniel Birnbaum, Jean-Louis Boissier, Andreas Broeckmann, Thierry Dufrêne, Francesca Gallo, Charlie Gere, Antony Hudek, Yuk Hui, Jean-François Lyotard, Robin Mackay, Anne Elisabeth Sejten, Bernard Stiegler, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein.

2020

This practice-based project begins with an exploration of the acoustic environments of a variety of contemporary museums via field recording and sound mapping. Through a critical listening practice, this mapping leads to a central question: can sounds act as objects analogous to physical objects within museum practice – and if so, what is at stake in creating a museum that only exhibits sounds? Given the interest in collection and protection of intangible culture within contemporary museum practice, as well as the evolving anthropological view of sound as an object of human culture, this project suggests that a re-definition of Pierre Shaeffer’s oft-debated term ‘sound object’ within the context of museum practice may be of use in reimagining how sounds might be able to function within traditionally object-based museum exhibition practices. Furthermore, the longstanding notion of ‘soundmarks’ – sounds that reoccur within local communities which help to define their unique cultural identity – is explored as a means by which post-industrial sounds such as traffic signals for the visually impaired and those made by public transport, may be considered deserving of protection by museum practitioners. These ideas are then tested via creative practice by establishing an experimental curatorial project, The Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS), an institution dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting sounds as objects of culture and human agency. MOPS displays sounds, collected via the author’s field recording practice, as museological objects that, like the physical objects described by Stephen Greenblatt, ‘resonate’ with the outside world – but also with each other, via their careful selection and sequencing that calls back to the mix tape culture of the late twentieth century. The unconventional form of MOPS – digital audio files on a single mobile phone accompanied by a museum ‘map’ and Gallery Guide – emphasizes social connections between the virtual and the physical. The project presents a viable format via which sounds may be displayed as culture while also interrogating what a museum can be in the twenty first century.

SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, 2016

This article presents a historical and theoretical reflection of the théâtrophone, a late nine- teenth-century telephone broadcast service that allowed users at a distance to listen in live to local theatre performances (spoken theatre, opera and musical concerts). Often cited as the first binaural experience in 1881, the théâtrophone’s much longer history as a subscription service, which operated in Paris from 1889 through the mid-1930s, is relatively unknown. This article considers what hearing through a théâtrophone meant to nineteenth- and twentieth- century users beyond its initial 1881 prototype. To hear through the théâtrophone means adopting a methodology mirroring the artefact itself: moving between social, professional, artistic, sensory registers. In doing so, the ways in which the théâtrophone was attuned to dis- course and practice emerge, as do more subtle processes involved in new nineteenth-century constructs of hearing and listening. Precisely the théâtrophone’s dev...

Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies, 2022

What kind of technology is the piano? It was once a distinctly everyday technology. In the bourgeois home of the nineteenth century it became an emblematic figure of gendered social life, its role shifting between visually pleasing piece of furniture, source of light entertainment, and expression of cultured upbringing. 1 It performed this role unobtrusively, acting as a transparent mediator of social relations. To the composer of concert music it was, and sometimes still is, says Samuel Wilson, like the philosopher's table: "an assumed background on which one writes." 2 Like other instruments standard to Western art music, the piano was designed to facilitate the production of a consistent and refined timbre. 3 More than most other such instruments, the piano also facilitated a kind of sonic neutrality. With its wide pitch range and smoothing of the percussive attack of its predecessor instruments, the piano presented composers with a technological means of approaching composition from a seemingly objective vantage point. It exemplified, in Heideggerian terms, the instrumentality of the instrument, 4 serving as a mediator between idea and expression that apparently adds no character of its own. This notion of the invisibility, or transparency, of the mediations that musical technologies such as the piano enact is one of my areas of concern here. 5 So too is its inverse: when these mediations become visible or opaque. Transparency has been a topic of significant recent theoretical attention. Stefanos Geroulanos, for example, has detailed how the supposed transparency of intersubjective, epistemological, and social relations was a major point of critique in postwar French thought, where the supposition of transparency was taken to suppress how the world was "complex, layered, structured, filled with heterogeneity" 6-and, as I will stress here, contingency. The thinkers Geroulanos considers, from Jean-Paul Sartre through to Jean-François Lyotard, can be said to be united in their refusal to invisibilise mediatedness. 7 From a starting point of conceiving of the piano as a technological artifact, and in particular from John Cage's 'prepared piano,' I will explore how a similar concern has appeared in musical contexts, albeit not without the risk of reversion back into a logic of transparency.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2013

With this paper I investigate the relationship between musical sources, modern and postmodern archiving technologies for archiving and repercussions on the sensuous experience of such musical artefacts: how the utilization of physical sources such as books, scores, manuscripts, vinyls and tapes has changed with the advent of digitalisation and online databases; how visual and tactile exposure to physical sources has been drastically modified by what philosopher Vilem Flusser calls ‘technical images’; how distinct and diverse personal relationships with physical sources of input have been progressively neutralised, standardised and perhaps even equalised by the introduction of digital devices, impersonal objects with multifarious performative purposes. Moreover, I examine epistemological and ontological implications of the emergence of contemporary sources of input that arise from programs which are exclusively digital, fully absorbed in the domain of the virtual, existing only in the realm of binary numbers, ephemeral virtualities (engraving and editing software suites for audio and video production, digital photography, design, tridimensional rendering, etc). I will investigate how proliferation of such sources impinges on the domain of the sensuous and on the social fabric, altering our very notion of history, chronology, tradition. Finally I will suggest futurabilities, pathways and methods of study for evaluating musical sources, and in doing so, I bring into play Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Library of Babel, Elias Canetti’s masterpiece Auto da Fé, and the ancient Chinese divination text I Ching.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 78-87., 2013

Journal of Musicology, 2019

Ethnologies , 2015

Museums have long been thought of as “quiet” spaces, in which visitors walk slowly through galleries to look at material cultures in glass cases. Music and sound have begun to pervade the quiet spaces of museums in the forms of aural installations and performance-based programs. They are no longer galleries for solely visual engagement, but loud spaces in which visitors and audiences listen to recordings, experience live performances, and participate by themselves singing and playing in workshops, classes, installations, and impromptu demonstrations. This article explores three case studies in exhibiting music. The first is the exhibition Ragamala: Garland of Melodies, which was on display at the Royal Ontario Museum and sought to demonstrate the fluidity between the South Asian arts. The second is an investigation of some of the formal and informal performance-based programming at the Aga Khan Museum. The last case study focuses on a future project, in which collectors of Indian audio cultures will submit contributions to help construct a history of sound in India. Each case study is motivated by a series of central questions: what constitutes “exhibiting music”? What are the broader implications of and consequences for exhibiting music in each case? How does exhibiting music in a museum impact a visitor’s experience? What kinds of new stories are told in exhibiting music and sound? The three case studies respond to these questions and provoke issues and possibilities for further critical inquiry. They show that museums are dynamic spaces with incredible potential to inspire multi-experiential engagement. -- On a longtemps pensé aux musées comme à des espaces paisibles, silencieux, dans lesquels les visiteurs se déplaçaient lentement en observant des objets de culture matérielle dans des vitrines. La musique et le son ont commencé à se propager dans les espaces tranquilles des musées sous la forme d’installations auditives et de programmes à base d’interprétations. Les galeries n’y sont plus des lieux d’investissement exclusivement visuel, mais des espaces bruyants dans lesquels les visiteurs et les différents publics écoutent des enregistrements, vivent des interprétations en direct et participent eux-mêmes en chantant et en jouant dans des ateliers, des classes, des installations et des animations impromptues. Cet article évoque trois études de cas d’exposition de la musique. La première porte sur l’exposition Ragamala. Guirlande de mélodies, du Musée royal de l’Ontario, qui visait à démontrer la fluidité des mélanges entre les arts de l’Asie du Sud. La deuxième interroge certaines des programmations formelles et informelles basées sur l’interprétation au Musée Aga Khan. La dernière étude de cas porte sur un projet à venir, dans lequel des collectionneurs de matériel culturel sonore de l’Inde proposeront des contributions pour aider à construire l’histoire du son en Inde. Chaque étude de cas est motivée par une série de questions essentielles : de quoi se constitue « l’exposition de la musique » ? Quelles sont les implications et les conséquences au sens large de l’exposition de la musique dans chacun des cas ? Comment l’exposition de musique dans un musée influe-t-elle sur ce que vit le visiteur ? Quels nouveaux types d’histoires se racontent dans l’exposition de la musique et du son ? Ces trois études de cas répondent à ces questions et suscitent des problèmes et des possibilités pour d’autres investigations cruciales à l’avenir. Elles montrent que les musées sont des espaces dynamiques ayant l’incroyable potentiel d’inspirer un investissement personnel multi-expérientiel.