Universität für Künstlerische und Industrielle Gestaltung Linz Institut für Medien Interface Culture SOUNDSREVOLTING:MAPPINGTHE AESTHETICAL-POLITICALSONIC oliver lehner Master Thesis MA supervisor: Sommerer, Christa, Univ.-Prof. Dr. date of approbation: March 2017 signature (supervisor): Linz, 2017 Oliver Lehner: Sounds Revolting: Mapping the Aesthetical-Political Sonic, Master Thesis, © March 2017 supervisor: Sommerer, Christa, Univ.-Prof. Dr. location: Linz ABSTRACT I demand change. As a creator of sound art, I wanted to know what it can do. I tried to find out about the potential field in the overlap between a political aesthetic and a political sonic, between an artis- tic activism and sonic war machines. My point of entry was Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare. From there, trajectories unfolded through sonic architectures into an activist philosophy in interactive art. Sonic weapon technology and contemporary sound art practices define a frame for my works. In the end, I could only hint at sonic agents for change. iii CONTENTS i thesis 1 1 introduction 3 1.1 Why sound matters (to me) . 3 1.2 Listening for “New Weapons” . 4 1.3 Sounds of War . 5 1.4 Aesthetics and Politics . 6 2 acoustic weapons 11 2.1 On “Non-lethal” Weapons (NLW) . 11 2.2 A brief history of weaponized sound . 14 2.3 Sonic Battleground Europe . 19 2.4 Civil Sonic Weapons and Counter Measures . 20 3 the art of (sonic) war 23 3.1 Advanced Hyperstition: Goodman’s work after Sonic Warfare . 23 3.2 Artistic Sonic War Machines . 26 3.3 Ultrasound Art and Micropolitics of Frequency . 31 4 the search for sound artivism 37 4.1 Art and Activism . 37 4.2 Creative Street Protest . 40 4.3 Mediating Protest through Sound Art . 44 4.4 Sonically-politically augmented architectures . 46 5 own works 51 5.1 Shopping Mill . 51 5.2 LARD . 54 5.3 Speculative Design Proposals . 57 ii appendix 61 a thank you 63 bibliography 65 v Part I THESIS INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 why sound matters (to me) I have been into electronic music since my teen years. At that time I was politically active in a socialist youth organization and part of the proletariat by working full time in a discount furniture store. The job was depressing enough, but the canned instrumental background music, transmitted via satellite and played back via ceiling-mounted loudspeakers throughout the shop and into the break room, would add insult to injury. The same bland pieces of non-music repeated roughly every two hours. To briefly escape the dreadful atmosphere I spent about a month’s salary on my personal sonic war machine: a sound system for my car. From then on, during lunch breaks a metamorphosis would take place: the subordinate clerk became a sub-sonic nomad, blessing the rural Upper Austrian soundscape with rolling basslines - early lessons in sonic territorialization. Fast for- 1 ward to Elevate Festival 2009: I attended a lecture by Steve Good- man on Sonic Warfare, around the time the book was released. Back then I would know Goodman by his DJ, producer and record label owner name, Kode9. I was not only surprised about his research tak- ing place outside the hedonistic comfort zone of the club but also thoroughly impressed about how he examined politics through the lens of bass music culture. And yet I visited the festival in order to dance and tucked the discourse away in my subconscious. Two years later I started my Bachelor studies to gain skills that would help me land a better job. Web design, maybe. During my studies, it became ever more apparent to me that I could not pretend to be interested in search engine optimization, brand creation, and project management. I rather made myself comfortable in the university’s well-equipped sound studio and focussed on sound design for short films and games. In the end, I could only work with what was already there: A tight grasp on digital tools, an urgent need to express myself and an ongoing alienation by late capitalism’s workings. I started my Master studies at Interface Culture and for the first time read Sonic warfare. Suddenly it all made sense. 1 The annual festival for music, art and political discourse takes place in Graz. https://elevate.at 3 4 introduction 1.2 listening for “new weapons” Sonic warfare made me listen. Influenced by recognized theorists of media technology and war, namely Friedrich Kittler, Paul Virilio and Jacques Attali, Goodman focusses on vibrational affects than merely on sonic effects. He emphasizes sound as a vibrational force and breaks with discourse engaged in textual, musicological readings of acoustic phenomena. And while the title may suggest otherwise, deployment of sonic weapons is not the central theme of the book. Goodman spins an intricate web, or rhizome, of topics that touch late capitalism’s ef- forts in audio branding and mood modulation, military technology becoming pop music clichée, sound system culture as post-colonial counter attack mechanism and Afrofuturist responses to contempo- rary urban dystopias. The last paragraph of Sonic Warfare already takes away some concepts that will be topics of the thesis: The attraction and repulsion of populations around sonic affect, and the aesthetic politics that this entails, while only the substrata out of which sociality emerges, is still a battleground. Experiments with responses to frequencies, textures, rhythms, and amplitudes render the divergence of control and becoming ever diminishing. For better and for worse, audio viruses are already everywhere, spread- ing across analog and digital domains. The military makes nonstandard uses of popular music, while underground music cultures make nonstandard use of playback tech- nologies, communications, and power infrastructures. As attention becomes the most highly prized commodity, the sonic war over affective tonality escalates. But as Deleuze would remind us, “There is no need to fear or hope, but 2 only to . [listen] . for new weapons. To get a better understanding of the workings of “aesthetic politics”, I turned to the event-based philosophy of Brian Massumi. Incidentally, his Semblance and Event was released as part of the same book series as Sonic warfare. “Emerging” and “becoming” are verbs that are central to his activist philosophy. For Massumi “art practice is a technique of composing potentials of existence, inventing experiential styles, coax- 3 ing new forms of life to emerge across polar differentials”. Some of the artworks presented in this thesis are examples lifted from Sem- blance and Event. My interest in corporate “audio viruses” made my work Shopping Mill come into being. The military’s “non-standard use of popular music”, for example as an interrogation technique in 4 Guantanamo Bay, has inspired research and artistic practices such 2 Goodman, 2012, p. 194. 3 Massumi, 2011, p. 74. 4 Cusick, 2006. 1.3 soundsofwar 5 as Reinhard Gupfinger’s sound installations. My work LARD is con- cerned with the “nonstandard use of playback technologies”, and its exhibition at a trade-fair-like setting of Ars Electronica Festival was a lesson in understanding “attention as the most highly prized com- modity”. Further, I will give a short overview of military-grade sound weapons and their development, as well as sonic self-defense tools for personal use. Followed by an account of activist art, my search for activism in the sound domain and politically engaged sound art. Through my research on sound studies and the evaluation of art projects, I could find some discrepancies between the alleged power of sonic affect and the actual employment of this powerful tool by artists. I will continue to discuss my works. The research for this the- sis gave me new tools to reflect and propose improvements as well as concepts for speculative works. 1.3 sounds of war War, as in armed conflict, is neither the principal theme of this thesis nor of the book that inspired my research. However, the history of sound reproduction is deeply entangled with technological progress spurred by military research. Friedrich Kittler argues that it took the combined research efforts of two world wars to arrive at High 5 6 Fidelity audio. Artistic sonic practices aren’t only shaped by the advancement of recording and playback equipment, but also by the 7 soundscapes of war, the belliphonic, , which particularly appealed to a group of proto-fascist speed freaks that would call themselves Futurists: As we await our much prayed-for great war, we Futurists carry our violent antineutralist action from city square to university and back again, using our art to prepare the 8 Italian sensibility for the great hour of maximum danger. The Futurist artistic output was comprised of painting, sculpture, po- etry and most notably, the first performances of noise music by Luigi Russolo in 1913, which stirred quite a controversy as Futurists de- 5 Chion disapproves of the term “fidelity” because it entails “a notion ideologically and aesthetically as risky as would be the notion of a faithfulness in the photographic image to the visible of which it provides us with a representation.” (Chion, 2015) 6 Kittler, 1993, p. 135. 7 As defined by Daughtry the term is a combination of the Latin word for war, bellum and the Greek word for voice, phone and refers to the sound of weaponry and motor- ized military vehicles as well as civilian gas generators, sirens, propaganda-emitting loudspeakers, human voices on the battlefield; “In short, the belliphonic in Iraq is the imagined total of sounds that would not have occured had the conflict not taken place”. (Daughtry, 2015) 8 Marinetti, Settimelli, and Corra, 1915 6 introduction fended the performance “in the face of uncouth abuse and insults on 9 the part of the passé-ists.” Twenty years later, Walter Benjamin concluded that fascism results in an aestheticization of political life and that all efforts in the aesthi- cization of politics culminate in the focal point called war.