Since the beginnings of modernism, sound has shaken up the norms of the history of art, expanding them and introducing a new level of complexity. This exhibition highlights the renewed fecundity of these exchanges over the last twenty years. Moving beyond the notions of audio art or sound art as coined in the 1970s , it assembles a wider range of artistic trajectories and cultures, while also taking into account the articulations between experimental music and exhibition spaces that have become increasingly visible in China in recent decades . Bringing together works from the Centre Pompidou’s collection and those of artists and musicians working in China, the exhibition brings to light a constellation of research that explores the expressive possibilities of sound in both its perceptual and conceptual dimensions. A key aspect of sound’s expressiveness lies in its ability to occupy space and spread in various ways – the displacement and ubiquity of listening, one might say – in connection with contemporary media. Sound is inherently fluid and invasive; the ear has no eyelids. The ways in which it is addressed and disseminated in contemporary contexts, media and devices are critically examined here.
The exhibition begins with several historical artists who explored these issues in the twentieth century through sound installations and experimental videos. Echoing these pioneering works, the propositions being developed today are the fruit of cultures that rarely confine themselves to a single mode of expression. Artists often move from concert to installation, from musical composition to technological research and to the creation of new visual languages. Improvisation protocols and collective cultures, field recording, sampling and collage, feedback and filtering, algorithmic generation and creation through social networks are all significant gestures in embracing a changing relationship with the world. The title of the exhibition, “I Never Dream Otherwise than Awake”, is borrowed from Emmanuel Lagarrigue, whose eponymous work from 2006 is presented as a choral landscape to be explored. Evoking a state of daydreaming, this statement is both a personal revelation and an invitation to examine the conditions of perception beyond convention and habit. It suggests a back-and-forth between wakefulness and sleep, between the lucid perception of the here and now and the free flow of dream work, where a semi-conscious state of research can begin, pointing to representations yet to come.
Here and There
The exhibition opens in the public space around the West Bund Museum and its atrium. Bill Fontana, Susan Philipsz and Sun Wei: three generations of artists who renew the idea of sound sculpture and give it multiple resonances. While their works structure the experience of space through auditory perception, they also create a layered, complex sense of time, providing material for future narratives. Bill Fontana, who studied with John Cage in the late 1960s, developed a specific form of sound sculpture in which sound is captured and relocated, moved from one place to another, profoundly altering the processes of perception and interpretation that combine sight and sound. Since the mid-1990s, Susan Philipsz has been interested in the connections between listening and memory, both individual and collective. Presenting a traditional folk song in her own non-professional voice, her work The Cuckoo’s Nest reminds us that the spatialisation of music, a characteristic of experimental research in the twentieth century, was already present in vernacular forms in the polyphonic art of the Middle Ages. Combining field recording, sampling and experimental electronics, Sun Wei composes with sound materials in the same way that one might shape a landscape to reconcile nature and artifice. His installation Sound Temple brings an echo of the sounds of the world into the museum. Sounds that he records or finds – including on the internet – are processed from a precise acoustic perspective, based on the frequencies conducive to meditation encouraged by the architecture of temples.
At first glance, these works seem to have a singular relationship to the architectural space, to the point of creating a specific place and situation where one is invited to take one’s place, so to speak. However, their sonorities also take us elsewhere, inviting and superimposing sonic realities from other places. These require a second hearing, heightened attention and clarity. At once here and there, in the present and in the long sweep of history, the echoes between distant places come together in unexpected musical configurations.
Thresholds of Listening
If listening is linked to proprioception, the awareness of one’s own body in space, the three works in this second section of the exhibition play with the limits of this sensory state, focusing on discrete, delicate sounds, sometimes on the edge of audibility. The installation by Edmond Couchot and Michel Bret bears witness to their pioneering experiments in computer interactivity between sound signals and digital animation. Only the frequencies of breath – picked up by a microphone made available to the public – gently set the visual representation in motion. The works by Emmanuel Lagarrigue and Hui Ye demand a state of active concentration, requiring one to strain one’s ears and get as close as possible to the source of the sound. The first takes the form of a journey in which Lagarrigue confronts the audience with an ocean of murmurs, made up of the fragile humming voices of amateurs singing their favourite songs. The second is a transparent motorised sculpture whose rotation amplifies random sounds. With gentle irony, Hui Ye attempts a literal representation of an abstract idiom: “It was so quiet that the pins dropped could be heard…”. Each of these works explores, in its own way, the gap between the regime of language and that of sensory experience.
Listening can be atomic, molecular; a micro-event in sound produces unexpected feedback and unsuspected vibrations. It is interesting to note that the eardrum is the most archaic remnant of the human organism, bearing witness to a pre-human sensory system that predates the rational operations of consciousness. The works presented here reveal the very experience of listening and the mechanisms of empathy that it evokes.
Sound and Sight
The perfect synchronisation of image and sound, achieved by cinematic technology at the turn of the 1930s and reformulated three decades later by the electronic signal in the medium of video, has given rise to a great deal of artistic experimentation. The three artists in dialogue in this section analyse and challenge the analogue technologies that coordinate sight and sound. In a seminal video from the 1970s, Gary Hill appropriates one of the first tools for the electronic visualisation of sound – the sine-wave oscillator – in a performance that illustrates how difficult it can be to combine the human organism to cooperate with the capabilities of the machine to enable a translation between sound and image. Wang Changcun pays homage to the “static sound” of cathode-ray tube television, which he juxtaposes with a field recording of a waterfall. By proposing a kind of “trompe l’oreille” (literally, ‘tricking the ear’) in which the sound information is misinterpreted as the equivalent of snow on television screens, his installation invites us to free ourselves from the assumption of veracity usually ascribed to sound images. In addition, Changcun suggests that sound and image transmit largely unknown frequency fields in which everything remains potentially legible and decipherable. Oliver Beer takes one of the masterpieces of synaesthesia, Snow White (1937), Walt Disney’s first full-length animated feature with sound, and shatters its unity by delegating its recreation to a group of children.
Each visitor will experience the contrasts, gaps and ruptures between the audible and the visible. The aim is to test a new axiom, with sound and image meeting in the poetic indiscipline of senses and ideas. Sensory memory can be deceptive; it leaves room for fertile disjunctions.
Diverting the Instrumentarium
Since the advent of the avant-garde in the twentieth century, the growing interest of visual artists in music has also led to the emergence of numerous works aimed at expanding the range of instruments: the modification or appropriation of the classical Western instrumentarium, as well as the conception or transformation of novel instruments – the artistic inventiveness in this field is limitless. These new resonant objects challenge, destabilise or redefine the boundaries of what is typically perceived as the “musical” character of sound. As early as 1913, Luigi Russolo's manifesto The Art of Noises proposed a musical approach to the soundscape of the urban environment. Russolo elevated the status of a vast array of noises, with the idea of transforming them into new timbres of musical sound. In the 1950s, John Cage proposed that all sounds deserve equal attention, shifting the focus of music towards active listening. The three contemporary artists featured in this section extend such conceptual shifts, by working with new materials and sonic situations whose primary quality is disruption. Yuko Mohri’s work constitutes an automated fanfare of found objects that subtly exude a sense of rebellious poetry infused with the absurd. Challenging the technicity of the musical game, Naama Tsabar has designed a double electric guitar that forces performers into an improvised collaboration, subtly distancing itself from the stereotype of the heroic solo associated with this instrument in rock music. In his series Muted Situations, Samson Young renders the sound of an entire symphony orchestra unrecognisable by removing the vibration of the instruments, the substratum of Romantic music that this vast ensemble was originally intended to elevate.
The term “sound object”, coined by Pierre Schaeffer in the 1950s, has taken on two semantic meanings over time. In one sense, it denotes an isolated sonic phenomenon perceived as a unit, whether musical or not . In another sense, it has gradually come to describe a wide range of material objects that artists, from Fluxus performances to contemporary installations, imbue with sonic intentionality and operativity. Such gestures shift the boundaries of the musical domain, challenging the cultural, social and political value systems attached to it in any given context.
Urban Wanderings
The history of how we hear is inextricably linked to the mapping of sound. As a place of constant human flow and interaction, the city is imbued with its own distinctive sonic identity. It is, by definition, a heterogeneous environment made up of overlaps, intersections and encounters. Whether chosen or conditioned by the vagaries of the economy, urban wandering represents a displacement that is both tangible and emotional, anonymous and intimately experienced. Through the medium of sound, Francis Alÿs, Zhou Tao and Emeka Ogboh address the often invisible realities that shape our experience of the city, a bustling territory of dense and fluctuating occupation, frequently contrasted with the peaceful and tranquil sedentariness of the countryside. In his video, shot in the streets of Venice, Francis Alÿs presents the performance of a conceptual duo for solo trombone. In this winding urban labyrinth, wandering becomes a poetic act in which the playful logic of chance takes precedence over the imperatives of productivity. Also a performance, Zhou Tao's work brings the sounds of rural life into the heart of a contemporary Chinese metropolis. Between centre and periphery, day and night, audible and inaudible, these polarities are transformed. Emeka Ogboh’s diptych of sound paintings brings the echo of the ever-present sounds of Lagos into the exhibition space. The work plays with an apparent formal abstraction, revealing through intermittent sounds references to the daily transit of Nigeria’s border populations.
Each of these three propositions contrasts in its own way with the tumult of the city, creating the conditions for a singular auditory event. A distinct, identified sound then emerges like a semaphore, directing our attention to rethink or reinvent our perception of the urban landscape.
Frequencies of Trance
The metropolis is also home to an increasingly effective internationalisation of music production. Since the 1990s, electronic music, driven by the record industry, has been the cultural flagship of globalisation. By absorbing spontaneous forms of working-class expression into a mass economy, it has established new rites of belonging and new forms of community across the globe . The two audio-visual installations dialogue with one another in this section examine the globalised musical ethos from the perspective of the vernacular through a subtle use of fiction. The respective soundtracks, charged with intense rhythmic parts, anchor imaginary scenes in which an interference of times unfolds. In a liminal space reminiscent of the seabed or a celestial vault, Hassan Khan creates a stirring dance, tinged with strangeness, to the sounds of electro chaâbi. This Egyptian musical genre is a contemporary version of traditional chaâbi music , reimagined through a lens of heightened electronic saturation. It is very popular and crosses all social classes, from the streets to discotheques and even private wedding parties. Khan composed the music and choreography himself, turning his work into an allegorical portrait of society. Liu Chuang interweaves two musical stories in a science fiction scenario, one celebrating the timeless beauty of the songs of Western China, and the other depicting the invasion of Western pop music in Hong Kong in the 1980s. Making references to ethnomusicological methods, he creates a fantastical narrative with a hypnotic quality, enhanced by the fact that it is broadcast from a psychedelic hi-fi cabinet, built at the turn of the millennium to recreate the atmosphere of a discotheque on a domestic scale.
In the conceptual practices of these artists, the borrowing of musical forms that induce deep or altered states of consciousness opens up a vast mental space of representation.
The Proxy Voice
The last two sections of this exhibition examine the influence of digital technologies on social practices associated with sound, music and listening in greater detail. These technologies facilitate and legitimise the complete disembodiment of individual expression in many ways. In telecommunications, the term “proxy voice” describes a system of encryption that conceals the identity of both the sender and the receiver. In psychoanalysis, it is understood as a technique whereby the therapist borrows the patient’s voice in order to facilitate the release of blockages. Once regarded as the most direct means of expression and the most authentic indicator of one’s individuality, the voice can now be delegated, and becomes an indirect means of expressing personality. It is this troubling phenomenon that the artist Anne Le Troter explores. After collecting messages from sperm bank donors, she staged a vocal choreography that demonstrates the distance between the body and its anonymised voice, which is mediated by an online platform. In this context, stereotypes emerge in the form of rhymes and repetitions, raising the question of who is articulating such homogeneous desires.
In some ways, ventriloquism can be seen as a precursor of the proxy voice. The growing popularity of ventriloquist shows in the mid-twentieth century can be attributed, at least in part, to the advent of radio . Never mind that the virtuoso animation of the dummy by the imperceptible vocal emission of its master was invisible to the audience; surprisingly, the credulity of the listeners was reinforced by the medium of radio, thanks to a double illusion: that of a voice twice dissociated from its body. Today, the use of delegated voices, which extends to the use of deep vocal fakes, serves to accentuate this detachment. In all fields, they generalise the agentivity of the artefacts of enunciation, communication and dissemination of discourse, in which the “first person” is ultimately untraceable.
The Sonic Web
On the global internet, images, texts and sounds are disseminated at an astonishingly rapid pace, so much so that their value is now gauged by the velocity at which they are transmitted . Virtual space can in effect be seen as a dynamic reservoir of data in which new approaches to creativity are emerging in response to the vast and ever-changing flow of information. In this section, the artist duo of Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst, along with Tao Hui and Molly Soda, develop distinctive forms of writing from this seemingly inexhaustible material. Herndon and Dryhurst’s digital animation creates an unsettling visual journey, revealing how the process of translation between the audible/readable and the visible can be orchestrated using generative artificial intelligence. Tao Hui’s audio-visual installation takes a rather tender look at the eclectic and abundant musical culture that flourishes on social networks. Using an opera singer as a lunar witness to a cut-up of music videos sourced from TikTok, the artist reflects on the disruption of our sense of intimacy. Molly Soda’s video collage evokes the loss of the original, erased by the culture of cover versions in music. Designed to merge anonymously with online content, her work transcends the narcissism that characterises the internet’s virtual community.
These works are not simply creative investigations into the heart of a new reality as imposed by contemporary “screenology”. Rather, they examine and anticipate the epistemological rupture that this new reality is making with pre-existing systems of authorship and intellectual property, with values of rarity and authenticity, and with the very form and organisation of the meaningful and the intelligible.
While big data and deep learning have brought about a revolution in the role that digital technologies play in our environment, generative artificial intelligence is powerfully implementing a constant and pervasive automation in which all representations are compelled to merge into new amalgams without limit. It is evident that echoing this state of the world, sound – which can be described as a “liquid” medium –has once again become a privileged object of research among artists and in academic and musical circles . The field of sound practices encompasses a range of artistic strategies, including sharing, disseminating, reworking, interpreting and hybridising, and their potential is constantly being rethought and expanded. By definition, they create a space for dialectical play in which the immateriality of vibrational phenomena meets and negotiates the shifting materiality of the conditions of their audibility. This exhibition, attentive to the plurality of directions observed in recent years, aims to sketch an open score. It proposes to build a bridge between the pioneering experiments of the last century and the new configurations of forms and ideas that artists are now addressing to contemporary society.