hear the surrounding atmosphere, the wind, the traffic, any subtle shifting in the 'background'. 166 There’s a certain discomfort that comes with silence. People get fidgety when there is a gap in the flow of what they are used to hearing. In life, we’re surrounded by noise. Vibrating air. Waves of circulating energies from televisions, personal devices, and other media outlets, including the media that incessantly saturates our awareness. When that noise is silenced, there’s a good chance that something has gone wrong. Imagine that the street traffic outside your window ceases and you’re left with the thin sound of the wind and the beating of your own heart. Sound is about contrasts, but it’s also about how frequencies work together. Current tele-arts practice is ironically familiar with the 'bi-directional' practice of John Cage. 167 In contrast to the reductive and composed quality of Cage's near silent symphonies, the heightened sonics of the doom metal band Sunn O))) best illustrates an example of an amplified polar extreme. In a sound performance's absorbing affects, unauthored168 technologies represent a porous anti-form,169 designed to emerge within an activated audience. Sunn O))) – Heightened Sonics The interesting stage presence and performance art of Sunn O))) generates a neo-baroque170 bi-polar example of an audience involved through creative interference; as an amorphic 'sound system'. Sunn O))) is an American doom metal171 band known for its synthesis of diverse genres including drone, ambient, noise, and black metal. Sunn O))) is named after the Sunn amplifier brand, whose logo includes a circle next to the “Sunn” moniker with waves heading off to the right. In interviews, Stephen O'Malley, 172 stated that the name was also chosen as a play 166
And as Douglas Kahn points out, “what becomes apparent in general is that while venturing to the sounds outside music, his ideas did not adequately make the trip; the world he wanted for music was a select one, where most of the social and ecological noise was muted and where other more proximal noises were suppressed” (Kahn, Winter 1997: 556-598).
167
The irony is that John Cage's campaign for anti-ego arts practice didn't intend for 'silence' to message anything except silence itself, sound in itself. Main streaming new media, for whatever purpose, while authorless, is still intent on hacking bodies, both data and flesh bodies, re-meaning accessible contents via transformational electronics. I wonder what Cage's take on Sunn O))) would be.
168
'Unauthored' is really not sufficient to describe how staging a situation and how an audience behaves in response, improvisationally reconfigures and reconditions a 'field' through creative interference. The observer in an interactive telematic system is by definition a participator. Such a view is in line with a more general approach to art as residing in a cultural communications system rather than in the art object as a fixed semantic configuration. This is important to the development of this research – that it locates practice in a communications medium and tries to 'embody' ideas about the dialectic or didactic rather than make commentary on them.
169
Loosely grouped 'Process Art' of the late-60s and early-70s, Robert Morris contemporaneously "posited the notion of 'anti-form' as a basis for making art works in terms of process and time rather than as static and enduring icons" (See: Artforum, April, 1968 "Anti Form" by Robert Morris / Sol LeWitt at Dwan / Bruce Nauman at Castelli / Walter De Maria and Richard Serra at Noah Goldowsky Allan Kaprow takes Robert Morris to task. (See: Artforum, Summer, 1968 The Shape of the Art Environment "How anti-form is Anti Form"? by Allan Kaprow - a response to Robert Morris' article of April, 1968] (including: Robert Morris, and Claes Oldenburg) / A Note on Golub by Robert Pincus-Witten / Robert Morris at Castelli).
170
The neo-baroque qualities of Sunn O))) juxtaposed with the more formal Zen systems of John Cage, their difference lies in the refusal to respect the limits of the frame ( the proscenium boundaries). Instead, Sunn O))) “tend[s] to invade space in every direction” (Focillon 1992: 58), combining multiple, shifting view points and narrative perspectives (within concert-goers own bodies) – all of which operate to collapse the classical function of the frame-stage (and conductor's control). The frame is present in both Cage's piece 4'33 and in Sunn O)))'s spatial containment so that its framing purpose can be undermined (by the mutatings of center through an amplified color-field of green smoke and within the swarming bodies of the audience). Sun O)))'s open systems are “typical of the baroque” and permit a greater “flow between the inside and outside” and operate according to a “polycentric logic” (Ndalianis 2000).
171
Doom metal is among the oldest forms of heavy metal rooted in the pessimistic music of early Black Sabbath (1970s), stylistically rooted in Blues. Described as 'slower, thicker, heavier' sound, stylistic divisions include: Traditional doom, Epic doom, Stoner doom, Sludge doom, Funeral doom, Drone doom, Death doom, Black doom and Gothic metal. There is a connection between how scary movies excite viewers and how doom music uses the same scary sensation to excite and to penetrate the audience.
172
Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson are regular band members and allude to an anonymous authorship to their performances. They mask themselves behind their sound equipment which takes a visual center stage. The audio-visual effects create a transformative