Sonic Thinking
My personal research itinerary is mainly influenced by writings on the history of sound art and by recent debates on curatorial techniques and exhibition making. I constantly try to interweave these with other theoretical fields of cultural practice, rather than grounding and elaborating my work solely on existing theories about sonic perception. Instead I want to work with daily appearances and phenomena to which we all have a direct access to. Of course this varies with any given cultural context. But I see this exactly as the main challenge for my work. It is my understanding that listening to all that sound out there and in here creates situations and conceptions that seem to be intelligible if not insubstantial to many listeners, but in fact are "enunciative of social relations", to say it with the words of the audio activist group Ultra-red. It is thus a question of filtering and accentuating acoustic space(s). To follow this idea is not supposed to lead anywhere in an ontological sense. It merely makes it possible to (re)think and (re)organize modes of listening as forms of aesthetic experience and practice. Here I think that to reinterpret the correlations between "visual" art contexts and sonic perception, and vice versa, is a highly effective approach. I operate with these contexts and the theoretical backgrounds attached to them in case studies, which mainly takes shape in exhibitions and curatorial concepts. Practically speaking, selected art works function as concrete examples embedded in theoretical frameworks open for input and exchange.
It is my aim as a curator in this context to find out what contemporary art practices may or may not be able to contribute to such a discourse on sonic thinking. As mentioned before, I'm convinced that the listening situations created within contemporary art contexts provide discerning settings for this investigation, and also bear a great potential to inspire and practice a discourse around it in many ways. Hence, on a practical level I use exhibition making as a research tool. Placing art works, concepts and audiences in diverse spaces I'm particularly interested in the modes of address which spaces for art display are able to offer or to take on. What are the anticipations and boundaries attached to a certain context or space, and what happens if we shift them. Just as this project once started with the most simple question: How can I curate sound art by not limiting myself to sound art?
Jens Maier-Rothe, 2009