This project analyses sound art—particularly works by Black and Indigenous practitioners—to develop an ethico-aesthetic framework showing how encounters with sound generate new forms of subjectivity and ethical reflection within contemporary human geography.
This project foregrounds sound art as a generative but underexamined area of focus in contemporary human geography. The discipline has a long history of engaging with the visual arts, however at present there is very little research on the ways of thinking, perceiving and feeling that are opened up in encounters with sound art. The project aims to address this gap by analyzing sound art pieces and recordings, demonstrating their relevance to contemporary human geography by exploring how they generate new ways of thinking about the relations that bind body and world. Constructing an innovative theoretical framework for analyzing sound art that draws upon and extends Felix Guattari’s concept of ‘ethico-aesthetics’, the project will show how encountering works of sound art functions to produce particular kinds of subjectivity in its listeners in ways that hold ethical implications for rethinking the forces that shape and mould human thought and behaviour today. Of particular interest to the project are works of sound art from Black and Indigenous practitioners whose works encourage critical reflection upon the production of subjectivity in Western, capitalist societies. Through documenting and analysing a series of encounters with sound art works, the project aims to build resources for the ethical project of re-singularising subjectivity in the context of the devastation wrought by Western models of perception, thought and evaluation.
School of Science, UNSW Canberra
Cultural Geography
1081 | 2041
