CIAC's ELECTRONIC MAGAZINE
no 36
APRIL 2010
Editorial
In the last couple of years, we’ve seen sound art deployed in a multitude of practices. This development is closely linked to recent technologies, Internet and their aesthetic modalities. The aim of this issue is to investigate this important emergence and to be a continuation of past Editor-in-Chief Anne-Marie Boisvert’s issue "Sound Explorations" published in 2002. As an essential trait of this young art form is the blurring of theory, practice, spectator and artists, I wanted to create, with this issue, an equilibrium between the contributions submitted by both artists and theoretician.
If Internet has become an important broadcasting platform for music and sound materials, it also has become a medium of importance for hypermedia sound creation. It would be quite simplistic to talk about a specificity of web sound art, but we still can identify its recurrent characteristics spreading to sound art in a more general way. We could first note the important place collective aspects take; a collectivity that relates to appropriation, sampling, remixology practices, free culture principles and the different licenses linked to it (copy left, Creative Commons) while not forgetting the shared economy. We also see this collectivity through the numerous collaborations between artists, musicians and programmers. Hypermedia sound artworks are made through transdisciplinary approaches reflecting not only in this know-how community consolidated via Internet, but also through an aesthetic experience in which the languages of sound, text and image blend and translate each others. To this, we can add the generative aspect allowed by the digital sound and the computer. The generative aspects, fastened with the performativity of the sounds, can renew their sequences infinitely. Net sounds sometimes take form through a visual space created by the interactive graphical interface, that we often call Soundtoy. This sound space becomes, for others, a way to underline a geographical milieu, listening to the ambient and daily sounds and sharing them via the web 2.0 platforms. The interactive aspect engages the netsufer in a creation process. Therefore, we can talk of Net Sounds as an activist art form in which listening, also means to appropriate, manipulate and share freely.
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