FIVE TYPES OF SOUND-BASED WEB WORKS
Let's begin by taking a closer look at some of these sound-centred Web works.3 One can first distinguish five general types, namely:
1) "intrusive" works, where sound spearheads the invasion, if not the storming of the viewer's screen, and thus, of his or her space (ex., Émilie Pitoiset's Caution, and Who_Owns_Them_Controls, by Glorious Ninth);
2) "inclusive" works, where, on the contrary, sound serves to delimit a particular Web space visitors are invited to enter, either to be offered a temporary reprieve - as much from the world as from the din of the Internet (as in Nancy Tobin's Rest Area) - or to engage in an exploration, where sounds serve as signposts in a space that can be the schematic representation of a real space "made audible" (like that of New York in Minami's Infrasonic Soundscape), an imaginary space (like Lochard's previously mentioned "labyrinth of sound"), or a symbolic space, where images, coupled with sound, comment on the surrounding world (as in Om, by Reynald Drouhin);
3) "interface" works, which are in fact less works per se than user-tools for the listener/visitor/musician (amateur or professional), possibly for producing future works, or simply for the pleasure of manipulating and experimenting with various sounds, of easily producing varied sound effects on one's computer (thus, LAB(au)'s sPACE, navigable music and Jean-Luc Lamarque's Pianographique)4;
4) works of poetry or of oral (or aural) literature, like Yucef Merhi's Poetic Dialogues5, where poetic expression and the "literary" give rise to an audio exploration. Here, the poem's meaning, fragmented and abandoned to the listener/visitor's manipulation, matters less than the permutation of words and sounds in the mouths of various actors; we hear less a text than the "grain of voice", to borrow Roland Barthes' expression (i.e., signification ("la signifiance") rather than meaning);
5) finally, we must also account for works of "pure" synesthesia, like The Shape of Songs, by Mark Wattenberg, where sounds are visually - and, of course, somewhat arbitrarily - represented by forms and colours with which they are meant to correspond.
What this short nomenclature brings out is a close relationship, in each case, between sound and content, and between sound, content and form (marked, besides, in the choice of titles: "Soundscape", "sPACE. NAVIGABLE MUSIC", "Rest Area", "Un labyrinthe sonore?" "Pianographique", "Shape of Songs", . . .) Sound-based Web art constitutes a spatialization, or staging, of sound; in turn, by the expediency of the latter - its production and effects -, the work carries out a delimitation, a delineation of its own play area in the undifferentiated space of the Web. Sound - whether its effects be "purely audio" (sound-effects) or "musical" - is thus presented to the visitor in the work's space, linked to one or more digital "objects" distributed over the screen (images, links, etc.) that act as support and trigger, either through the programming of the work that proceeds of its accord, spinning out its sounds and images from the get-go, or - most often - through the visitor's clicking on one link or another to select sounds.
A SHORT ASIDE
In the history of modern art and culture - generally, since the end of the nineteenth century -, one can make out two major trends: on the one hand, a process of refinement and particularization of the medium (like painting, sculpture, etc., but also literature and even film); and on the other, a subversive endeavour, concatenating all mediums in the collage, montage and assembly of various objects and mediums (mixing, for instance, painting and sculpture; or assembling objects and "sounds" or noises, pre-recorded or "produced" on site by a "participant", the author and/or the spectator, etc). In these two, seemingly irreconcilable currents, we can nevertheless discern a common trait: theatricality - that is, either the staging (of interrelationships between elements in the work, between the work and the space in which it figures and, finally, between the work and the spectator), or in the mise en abîme (of the act of creation itself, and of the work as a work, in the self-referentiality of the work with itself, of the act of creation with itself, in the self-referentiality of the work with its medium). Yet, with the introduction of this theatricality, it is time, in the end, that emerges in the space of the work, which becomes not "simply" an object, but a world onto itself. The emergence of this temporal aspect, already present in narrative of course, is more of an event in the so-called "visual" arts, engendering decidedly new types of art. Naturally, this brief "historical" aside is simplistic. It is nonetheless useful in putting forward a first observation on the subject of sound-based Web art, one that may prove enlightening: that we may associate this type of work with the two most "decidedly new" artistic forms - installation and performance -, in which we find precisely the same theatricality, mixed with self-referentiality, described above.
SOUND-BASED INSTALLATIONS?
First, the installation: like it, Web art is generally made up, as we have seen, of an assemblage of "objects" (images, links, icons, texts), arranged, interconnected, and/or (often) manipulated in a space/time (itself often moving and changing) - the characteristic of "audio" works, in contrast to other Web art, being precisely that they are "focused on sound", that is, they stage sounds, noises, sound effects in a "virtual" space, just as "audio" installations do in "real" space.
But, as Peter Szendy rightly observes in Installations sonores?:
"The afflictions [that threaten any sound installation] coalesce into an impossibility: sound, as such, cannot be displayed. As a consequence, what sound-based installations make visible are: the support underlying the sound, the mechanisms producing the sound, physical phenomena connected with the propagation of sound."6
But in what does this "impossibility" of staging sound itself consist? It rests in the fact that sound is never present in the work: it is produced, or reproduced. Thus, we must immediately adjust the statement to say: what these works stage are in fact the means of production, the production, or reproduction, of these sounds and of these noises, that is, the "conditions of possibility"7 of the sound installation itself.
Another observation: sound illustrates neither itself nor anything else. Indeed, an image always has some degree of referential rapport with what it represents (if only with itself) in an analogical relationship that, once (en|de)coded, may become symbolic.8 Sound, for its part, while it may have evocative power, never represents or signifies anything as such, that is, not systematically. In other words, the discrete nature of music, as of simple rhythmical sound effects, consisting of alternating sounds and silences, does not make them part of a sign system. Their evocative power, the mental images they can elicit while being heard or in conjunction with visual elements (or even with narrative or emotive themes, as in a "synesthetic" work, or in program music9, for instance) are not only purely arbitrary, but, as opposed to language, are never part of a code - only sometimes of an apparent code, the promise of a decoding - but only a promise, the occasion, rather, for an acknowledgment or divination, sometimes a sharing, or a communion. Sound, then, is always situated beyond - or below - the sign proper: it is a hint, or rhythm, or signification ("la signifiance").10 Sound-based work invites the listener to trace the course, his or her course, through the assemblage of a series of sounds or sound samples; sound resonates in the space, traversing and measuring it, its waves dispersing, reflecting and echoing. Establishing correspondences, reminiscences, resonances in the work's space, the process resembles an exploration and delineation of a world, of a space in which time has its place - of a space/time. For time, as tempo, or scansion, is of course already an attribute of rhythm, the alternation of sounds and silences. Musical time would thus be at once a time-measure (Kant), a condition of the space of all experiences, and a time-duration (Bergson), that is, time as experience, in this case an aesthetic experience. Listening (to an "audio" work) therefore allows one to relate exteriority (the space in and around the work, that of its support, and the listener's space) with interiority (that of the subject within the aesthetic experience).
These analogies and correspondences, particular to each case, therefore do not constitute a system of representation, properly speaking, with codes, rules, and so on, implied and shared by both creator and receiver. All the more do such works present the problem of their reception. Must we then, for each work, rely only on the context of reception, unique and particular to each case, the result of an ever-changing encounter between the work and the visitor?
POSSIBLE WORLDS
For the value of such works - "only" visible and audible because actualized and re-actualized for each visitor in a space where they only ex-sist and sub-sist virtually, disseminated on a screen and viewed from a distance, but nonetheless perceived more personally than publicly, as events rather than objects, and as open as possible - rests less on representation or imitation than on simulation or modelization. As such, they are rather the object of an exploration - and often a manipulation - than of an interpretation in the traditional sense of the term (that is, in the sense that an author's intention is translated in a symbolic structure the reader or spectator must decode, which, to certain extent, always implies the omniscience of the author, the permanence of the work, and especially the pre-existence of a symbolic code, even ambiguous, that is shared, or at least managed, by the reader or spectator). Web works effectively constitute small worlds that extend in their own, parallel space/time, within a constantly expanding cyberworld, where sound, image and text are set in discrete or synesthetic relationships.
"The canonical genre of cyberculture is the virtual world. [. . .] The engineer of worlds appears then as the leading artist of the twenty-first century. He provides virtualities, designs communication spaces, arranges the collective equipment for cognition and memory, and structures sensorimotor interaction with the data universe."11
The Web artist doesn't so much create representations, the way artists do in traditional media, which the reader or spectator must interpret, as he does possible worlds, which the visitor must actualize. Actualization, rather than the work itself, precedes the interpretation (in the hermeneutic sense of the term), because actualization is in itself an interpretation (in the performative sense). Thus, Web art institutes (or at least seeks to institute) a certain rapport with the spectator/visitor, a rapport that, in turn, constitutes an advance that allows one to read all art works differently, encouraging their interconnection, for instance, rather than their categorization or hierarchy, and of course, interactivity rather than passive reception.
Therefore, while we could at first compare sound-centred Web art to sound-based installations, in the end, we must admit that Peter Szendy's three criteria (in the text already cited) for the definition of this type of work need revising - even to be reversed completely into their "contrary" - if they are still to inspire us in characterizing "audio installations" conceived for the Web.
These three criteria are:
1) "Understanding sound as something material", Peter Szendy writes (citing Bill Viola), adding: "[B]esides, 'materiality' stands perhaps as a good generic term to encompass a concern for the support, production mechanisms, and physical phenomena of sound propagation";
2) "integrating the environment and audience into the work's setup (opening it, by the same token, to some degree of the aleatory)";
3) "permanence", finally, which helps distinguish the installation from concerts and happenings.12
And yet:
1) while the materiality of Web art may exist at the level of chips and bits, that is not a "tangible" and "perceptible" materiality at the level of the work itself; at this level, the "materiality" of Web art components dissolves behind their virtuality. The heterogeneous nature of objects and supporting media in "traditional" installations contrasts with the homogeneity of objects and media on the Web, all reducible to the computations of programming languages13;
2) interactivity is certainly characteristic of Web works, but "integrating the environment", on the other hand, seems often denied in cyberspace, where these works appear; one would rather speak of the spectator's "immersion"14 in an environment, virtual once again;
3) "permanence", finally, also fades away in works that are actualizations rather than productions.
Hence the association of sound-based Web art with the other type of work that, as mentioned previously, takes its place along side installation as a decidedly modern mode of expression - performance; here, the interpretor [performer] blends with the spectator/listener.
As such, these works are exemplary models of what Umberto Eco called the "work in movement", i.e. a work at the same time "open" (to multiple interpretations) and interactive, a type of work which defines, in his view, the main trait of contemporary art works in general.
THE OPEN WORK
"Beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie !" ("Beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella!")
(Isidore Ducasse, a.k.a. comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, p: 322)
This "definition" of the beautiful - one in a long list - by Lautréamont in his work published in 1869 is often cited (by the Surrealists15, among others, who rediscovered the "accursed writer" and chose him as one of their precursors) as an exemplary definition of the concept of the beautiful and of modern art's typical aesthetic effect. Interestingly, Kant, in his Critique of Judgment, had also offered a "paradoxical" definition of the beautiful, with his "quadruple paradox of the beautiful", a definition that, proposed at the dawn of Romantic art, would eventually open the way for all modern art:
1. The beautiful is a disinterested pleasure.
2. The beautiful is a subjective necessity.
3. The beautiful is a universal with no concept.
4. The beautiful is a finality with no end.
I don't have space here for detailed comment on this definition, the paradoxical aspect of which is pretty obvious. However, I want to bring particular attention to the second paradox, which, all in all, not as much reverses as it constitutes the correlate to the statement the Surrealists would put forward in speaking of "objective chance", a notion similar to that already summarized in Lautréamont's phrase16. The acceptance of chance in the work do presupposes welcoming the unexpected, as much on the part of the author as on the part of the performer or of the spectator/listener: welcoming, which is to say openness. But on the other hand, the welcoming of the "objective chance" in the work is monitored by the feeling of "subjective necessity". In other words, if one analyses Lautréamont's phrase, one could see that the concept of "objective chance" is illustrated by the words "chance encounter"; the "dissection table" is the frame of the work; and the adjective "beautiful" - which always been the traditional name given to æthetic value, i.e. of what it is that makes a work to be a work - of art - for somebody - this adjective at the beginning of this sentence signifies the apparition of the "subjective necessity" transforming the work of chance into a work of art. Thus "objective chance" combined with "subjective necessity" transform the work of art into a "finality with no end", meaning that the work begins to "exist" as a work of art, but nevertheless preventing the reception of such a work from being entirely pre-determined. Therefore, understood as a "universal with no concept", the work gains a universal value which allows it to go beyond solipsis and to talk to somebody - or to many - belonging to a community gathered together by intersubjectivity and taking a "disinterested pleasure" in the work and its possibilities, rather than to submit the work to a platonic Idea of the Beautiful as such, like in traditional æthetics.
According to Eco, this tension between openness and conditions of interpretation is the main characteristic of all contemporary art17. Indeed, for Eco, art work, by its very nature, is always subject to several interpretations - as opposed to the unequivocal messages carried by common messages and signs, generally emitted and decoded in a context that participants strive to render as transparently as possible. Thus can art works generally be said to be open - open to many, but not countless meanings and interpretations. Moreover, still according to Eco, what characterizes the works of the contemporary era compared to those which preceded them in history is precisely this same idea of openness, but an openness of the greatest possible breadth, and especially an openness artists consciously intend and seek, making their works truly plurivocal spaces.
In "traditional" works, the artist certainly authorizes (and is authorized) freedom with the code, with the aesthetic canons, which remain exterior to and preexist the work: the artist can only deviate up to a point - and his daring rhetorical creations will be counted as discoveries that enrich the code. On the contrary, in the open work typical of modernity, the "code", if one may call it that, is interior to the work. Rather than of a "code", in fact, one should now speak more modestly of giving form, particular in each case, to a meaning the artist intends - or strives - to communicate: a poetics rather than a rhetoric of the new, more concerned with structuring the work than with stylistic ornamentation. Eco describes the "poetics of the informal"18 as:
"the possibility of communication all the more rich in that it is more open, resid[ing] in a delicate balance, in the minimum order compatible with maximum disorder. This subtle balance marks the border between the sphere in which all possibilities are indistinct and a field of possibilities."19
The critic's task, as that of any receiver, is then to bring out this "minimum order", that is, the formal structures inherent to the work, that are the reflection and the result of the artist's project, that is, of his intention at the root of the work - his vision, the aim of the effects created in the work and in the receiver's experience of it (naturally, the project of the work doesn't always correspond with the result). Is this to say that the work's value hinges on the author's ability to intend and plan all the effects, all the possibilities? Or, to be more precise, that the open work will draw its value from its realization, from the awareness of this tension between the informal and the unformed that the artist will have put and allowed for in the work. In the end, not only will the work be open, but author and receiver will have to show the same openness, sensitive to the work's creative and welcoming possibilities.
To conclude, then, one could say that Web art, including sound-based works, proves to be more open that ever - by the virtual nature of its medium, described above, and by the high degree of interactivity it encourages -, and that such works can, in turn, enlighten us on the status of contemporary art work in general, on its aesthetic possibilities. . . and on its dangers.
THE POETIC OF THE INFORMAL AND ITS "DANGERS"
For here, of course, rests the problem of interpretation, and that of reception.20 How does one interpret? Traditionally, we are told, one applies a code. But, - another paradox - how can there be an individual "code", inherent to the work, as the term "code" evokes the prior idea of a community (that is, of conventions, rules, agreement, sharing)? There resides the danger of the poetics of the informal: that, for the work, of falling into the formless and, for the artist (and the receiver), into soliloquy (or autism). Consequently:
"Even in the affirmation of an art of vitality, of action, of gesture, of triumphant matter, of chance, a dialectic is established once again between the work and the 'openness' of its 'readings.' A work is open so long as it remains a work. Beyond that, openness becomes noise.
Determining this 'threshold' does not belong to the field of aesthetics: it is critical reflection that establishes, for each [work], the extent to which the various interpretative possibilities ('openness') are intentionally arranged in a field that orients the reading and directs choices. The message then has communicative value, instead of reducing itself to an absurd dialogue between a signal that is now only noise and a reception that is nothing but solipsistic madness."21
One could perhaps see the computer screen - acting simultaneously (and inevitably) as frame, support, and display unit for all Web art - as a first possibility for such works to counteract the danger of formlessness. These works, like installations (like any work, in the end), "would have [contrary to the exhibition] a principle of closure, even if overflowing with the reception within the work of aleatory contextual variations."22 Umberto Eco says the same thing, in a much more general way, when he explains that what distinguishes the signal from mere noise, is (in the first case) an intention, and then goes on to affirm that "it suffices to transpose a sackcloth in a frame to 'mark' a raw material as artefact. But here enter the various modalities of this mark and the force of the suggestions made with respect to the spectator's freedom."23
All these considerations lead us to a pragmatic conception of interpretation not very distant from the one Wittgenstein (the "second" Wittgenstein) put forward for the analysis of language and, more broadly, of "culture": a contextual, and no longer deconstructive, analysis of facts and behaviours, of "language games"24 used in "forms of life", rather than of the components (and their reference) of discourse in itself. Already, in Tractatus, Wittgenstein upheld that "the world consists of facts and not of things." Of facts, that is, among other things, of activities, cultural and social, that can only be understood and interpreted in relation to their context (of utterance or action, what Wittgenstein calls "forms of life").
CONCLUSION
Web art works are merely sites among others in cyberspace. The abundance and proliferation of sites, however, does not mean that cyberspace is a place of endless and limitless dispersal, where everything coexists simultaneously and the visitor is endlessly worsted by the proliferation of signs haphazardly and indiscriminately bombarding him; rather, cyberspace is in fact a network - a web -, which the visitor learns to travel, to explore, and to mark out. Indeed, while art works designed for the Web set out, each in their way, to explore this new "parallel" space, virtual and tentacular, to reveal both its possibilities and its limits, the particularity of this new medium confers a special status on these works in turn. This specificity can be summed up in a few words: virtuality, interactivity, motion, . . . a place, in short, where "the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere", to take up a well-known expression. In this network, Web art works constitute a sort of reflection or mise en abîme of this process of exploration and appropriation, managing, in the end, to produce "meaning" - even precarious, even limited - for a visitor and even (ideally) for many; they engender a community, that is, a kind of understanding, of communication and of consensus, even ephemeral, a "form of life." The rules of utterance and of interpretation that govern this understanding do not preexist it: they are to be questioned and rediscovered each time.
"Contrary to Plato's successors, who sought the order behind the apparent disorder, it is now [a question] of reversing the proposition: the science of disorder seeks the real disorder behind the apparent order. In the new concept of 'sound as process' (no longer the found object of times gone by), such notions as materials, structure, or form come undone."25
Chaos theory teaches us, or rather, demonstrates for us: order is only a state that is established within disorder - and only for a time. But this state - even fleeting - is enough to make worlds. And the little world of the Web work can thus end up gathering a community around it.
We can therefore see sound-based Web art as encouraging the visitor/listener to favour a contextual grasp of the work, in which the visitor/listener must include himself, rather than a simple decoding. Consequently, we could maintain that audio Web works, in particular, are exemplary models for those who attempt to establish what we may call an aesthetic of actualization, rather than of representation. Such works would then be less the result of a symbolic exemplification or the equivalent of a structure (closed unto itself), following a fairly typical "modernist"26 conception of the art work,25 but rather the play of a process, that is, of an impermanent emergence, the fruit of an actualization in an interactive context.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Roland Barthes (with Roland Havas) (1976), "Écoute", and (1964), "Rhétorique de l'image", in L'obvie et l'obtus, Essais critiques III, Ed. Du Seuil, Paris, 1982.
Umberto Eco (1962), L'Œuvre ouverte, Ed. du Seuil, Paris, 1965.
Isidore Ducasse, a.k.a. comte de Lautréamont (1869), Les Chants de Maldoror, Le Livre de poche, Paris, 1963.
Pierre Lévy (1997), Cyberculture : rapport / [de] Pierre Lévy au Conseil de l'Europe dans le cadre du projet "Nouvelles technologies : coopération culturelle et communication". Ed O. Jacob , Paris et Ed. du Conseil de l'Europe, Strasbourg, 1997.
Jacques Monod (1970), Le Hasard et la nécessité, Ed. du Seuil, Paris, 1970.
Peter Szendy (1997), Installations sonores?, in Synesthésie #11 (Hétérophonies).
Michel Tournier (1977), Canada. Journal de voyage, Ed. La Presse, Ottawa, 1977.
Jean-Noël von der Weid (1993), Karlheinz Essl.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1922), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. Pears, Routledge, London, 1961.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), Philosophical Investigations, Ed. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
