1. Jordan Lacey Curatorial Essay: Translating Ambiance

This exhibition asks: is it possible to translate ambiance between environments, and what are the embodied processes employed during acts of translation? Translated ambiance considers the body and its situatedness, as a site of perceptual difference entwined within an immediate spatial encounter. Each artist has been asked to create a work that considers their own experiences and perceptions while engaged in the process of translating phenomena between environments, using methods and tools particular to their practices.

To understand how translation as a concept is applied here, it is useful to consider Nicolas Bourriard’s use of the term. He argues, if postmodernity fractured the unitary dream of modernity into archipelagos of otherness, then the move towards ‘altermodernity’—an alternative to globalisation that preserves diversity—is characterised by processes of translation. In his book, The Radicant , he writes:

‘translation always implies adapting the meaning of a proposition, enabling it to pass from one code to another’

What is translated will always differ from what was translated ‘since every translation is inevitably incomplete and leaves behind an irreducible remainder’. Similarly, translation is explored in this exhibition as a method for discovering new places of encounter, which references both ‘natural’ and ‘urban’ environments.

The terms nature and urban are heavily coded, related as they are to our own cultural and political references. In their codifications they have come to mean something very different to each other. The urban, a land of excitement, concrete and noise; and nature, as places for escape and restoration: at least their coded reputations would have us believe in such dualistic caricatures. It is by transversing the natural and the urban that the artist reveals new possible worlds. Like Bourriard’s altermodernity, the act of translating ambiance provides an alternative to the homogenising forces of globalisation, where rather than uniformity, translation suggests a diversity of environments, encounters and experiences.

Thibaud states in his catalogue essay that ‘ambiance is not what one perceives, it is not an object of perception. It is from this which one perceives, which opens up the perceptibility of the world, which enables perception’. To translate an ambiance is not to try and recreate the feelings or experiences of one place into another place. It is the application of creative techniques that expand the perceptual range of the world, through the production of new phenomena. Sound is a particularly effective means to both understand and create ambiance. This is largely due to the power of audio technologies to record and relay the sonic. It can, therefore, be more easily translated (i.e. recorded) between environments, and shaped with editing suites. However, it should be remembered that despite the sophistication of technological prowess it is the simple process of listening that relays the affectivity of sonic ambiances. With or without technological mediation, listening presents an embodied awareness of place that can evoke new imaginary relationships with the world.

Common to all of the artists involved in this exhibition is the use of sound and listening as part of their working methodologies. Sound has an important role in the generation of ambiance, given its affective and relational qualities, as so elegantly discussed by Brandon Labelle (sonic relationality) and Salomé Voegelin (sonic possible worlds). Sound always surrounds us, we can never switch it off, and as such our being and imaginations are shaped by its flows and intensities. Many of the sound artists in this exhibition, as Samartzis states in his essay, maintain a ‘spirit of independence, of being outsiders within [a] system’ particularly academic institutions where ‘sound has always been a problem (…) for one reason or another. Its history doesn’t fit neatly into the story of art, nor the story of music. Its practice is oftentimes loud, sometimes obnoxious, occasionally poetic’. Accordingly, diverse and idiosyncratic responses to the translating ambiance theme have emerged in this exhibition. From shifting guttural noises of the body as it transits across environments; the re-creation of phenomena from natural settings into everyday urban motifs; translations created for the mind while suspended in a body-bag; and, the possibility of coding politics into natural phenomena and materialities. As this exhibition will demonstrate, there is no right answer to the question, what is translation? Rather, each artist has chosen a unique way to present translation, as it applies to their practice.

There is an additional, opaque quality to this exhibition: the gallery acts as a research environment. Each artist is asked to produce an autoethnography in reference to the works (including their own) that considers the affectivities produced by each work’s generated ambiance. As Pink describes in her essay:

‘human perception is ongoing and multisensorial’ and ‘the artist is essential in seeking to create the circumstances within which such experiences, feelings and meanings will emerge’.

As such, it is the sound artist’s acute awareness of phenomena that propels the ethnographic dimension of this exhibition. This collective ethnographic act, is in itself, a meta-translation of artistic knowledge. Such creative know-how could, and should, be translated into the utilitarian processes employed by engineers and planners, whose charters are, partly at least, responsible for the increasingly homogenous character of our global cities. Indeed, identifying pathways for artists to engage in discussions of urban futures is at the heart of this exhibition’s ethnographic intent. By treating the gallery as a research environment we may discover methodologies for the creation of urban ambiances, that manifest new imaginative and bodily encounters.

2. Jean-Paul Thibaud Ambiance: An Atmospheric Sensitivity of the World

Ambiance is part of a general movement of openness to the senses. It contributes to the emergence of new frames of sensitivity. Whether one insists on the aestheticization of urban spaces or the increasing attention to ecological issues, the development of experiential marketing or the diffusion of ambient intelligence, our way of being sensitive to the spaces we inhabit is changing. No doubt we are engaged in a historical moment of transformation of our sensory conditions of existence. In other words, we are witnessing the birth of an atmospheric sensitivity of the world. Percepts and affects regain their own rights, involving the diversity of sensory modalities and recognizing the importance of bodily experience. With ambiance, it is not only a question of perceiving a landscape or measuring an environment, but of feeling situations in common and experiencing the sensory contexture of social life. From now on the sensorial is to be heard and ambiance is one of its most powerful resonators.

In this respect, the notion of medium is of prime importance, summoning the air in the first instance, that imperceptible but no less vital medium. Hence we should not be mistaken: an ambiance is not what one perceives, it is not an object of perception. It is from this which one perceives, which opens up the perceptibility of the world, which enables perception. No vision possible without light … no audition possible without sound … But also, the domain of ambiances is not an isolated domain, autonomous, independent from social practices. On the contrary, any ambiance is embedded in common gestures and forms of sociability. It involves social performances that actualize the resources of the built environment and accomplish our ways of being together. Thus we need to pay particular attention to the background of ordinary practices. What is taken for granted and usually goes unnoticed is the basic material of an ambiance. A way of walking, looking or speaking, quality of air or light, bright sunshine or sudden rain, the height of a stair or the material of a sidewalk are part of the composition of an ambiance. But an ambiance does not come from one or more of these components, it is not limited to their mere addition. An ambiance is rather the connection and coalescence between these various elements, to hold them together by giving a single tone and a unique pervasive quality to everything that appears. We are dealing here with the power of homogenization and atmospherisization of an ambiance. Ambiance leads to a shared, embodied, enacted and situated sensory experience.

As a nomadic concept, it goes from one science to another one. It migrates, circulates, translates. Far from being attached to a single scientific discipline or domain of action, it spreads and proliferates in regions as diverse as sensitive architecture or existential psychopathology, social anthropology, cultural geography or phenomenological philosophy, literary or urban studies, the area of organizations or consumption, the world of art … In doing so, ambiance pushes the boundaries of the disciplines and complexifies each time it comes into contact with them. In any case, ambiance highlights the pathic feature of experience, embodies the affective tonality of situations and involves the modes of attunement of everyday life. Theoretical tools then refine and diversify to its passage. New ideas are experimented such as quasi-objects and sensory effects, tuned spaces, climatic envelopes, ordinary affects, atmospheric affordances, ambient gestures and other diffuse qualities. Thus emerges an unprecedented field of research, which contributes to an extended sensory ecology of life forms and explores the potentialities of a socio-aesthetic of dwelling.

Finally, one has to reflect upon the diversity of the models on which the notion of ambiance or atmosphere is based (a more thorough clarification between these two notions should be made). Five main theoretical frameworks can be identified, sharing arguments and placing them in discussion:

1. ambiance according to the situationist movement insists on the critique of everyday life and promotes intensifying the emotional potential of urban situations;
2. new phenomenology from German language tradition develops a philosophy of the lived body and leads to an aesthetic of atmospheres;
3. a more pragmatic approach explores the transformative and generative power of ambiances and puts them to the test of empirical investigation;
4. non-representational theory inspired by Deleuzian and poststructuralist trends of thought explores affective atmospheres in terms of intensities, forces and events;
5. spherology approach initiated by Peter Sloterdijk introduces a general theory of air conditioning and focuses on atmospheric installations as immune systems.

Obviously these dividing lines are abusively simplified. However, this brief cartography allows to show the inscription of the theory of ambiances in various traditions of thought and to promote a pluralism of approaches. Among the various topics of discussion, three important ones can be mentioned. First, a basic theoretical problem concerns the role of the subject and human subjectivity in relation to ambiance. If affects and bodies occupy a central place recognized by all, the question remains open as to how to understand them. Is it necessary to make human experience the measure of an ambiance or rather to open it to the non-human, the more-than-human, the pre-individual? How far should we be inspired by post-phenomenological thoughts that propose a decentering subject? Second, instead of focusing on what an ambiance is, and how to define it, we could explore what ambiance accomplishes and performs. What does an ambiance enable to perceive, to do, to feel, to share? Where does the notion of ambiance lead us in terms of sensitivity, thought and design? Third, how about the capacity of these various perspectives to confront empirical reality and integrate the major mutations of contemporary life. The challenge here is to give a concrete account and thick description of the ambient world. How then to seize an area that first and foremost deals with the diffuse, the discreet and the molecular? How to explore and experiment with new forms of inquiry? How can the art world help with this?

3. Sarah Pink Ethnography and Ambiance

Ambiance is felt, sensed, in our bodies and emotions. Our ways of knowing and imagining in and with the ambiance of a place or moment cannot be captured by technologies of measurement and modelling. So how can we encounter and understand the feelings that are emergent from our encounters with the ambiance of art? This involves understanding human perception as ongoing and multisensorial, and always contingent on the swirling myriad of human and nonhuman things and processes that configure as the flow of everyday life continues. To bring about ambient experiences, the anticipatory sensibilities and techniques of the artist are essential in seeking to create the circumstances within which such experiences, feelings and meanings will emerge. The elements thought to contribute to ambiance—such as sound, light, temperature—can be measured, but such technologies cannot access or convey human perception or meaning. Ambiance cannot be rationalised or objectified and the process of creating it cannot be modelled. Creating ambiance is not a predictive science, so how do we make, know, feel, document and reflect on the ambiance that is generated through artistic practice?

Design anthropological theory and practice offer a mode of understanding and articulating ambiance. In such an approach theory and practice are always in dialogue. Sensory ethnographic practice draws on the phenomenological anthropology of Tim Ingold, and its attention to the multisensory experience that is inextricable from the ways that we all (researchers, artists and those who encounter our work) encounter and learn in and with the environments we move through. It offers modes of documenting, reflecting on and anticipating the ambient possibilities that can emerge from encounters with art, through a focus on the sensory embodied experiences that we might find it difficult to describe in spoken words. It also, through its emphasis on futures, focuses not only on what things feel like in the present or felt like in the past, but on how we sense futures, again in ways that it might be impossible to express in words. Design Anthropology, can also welcome the uncertainty of what might happen next, within its practice. It understands future as always contingent, unknown and unpredictable. In this sense futures are not fixed, but instead exist as possibilities, and the study of futures can be seen as uncovering possibilities and the modes through which people anticipate them. A focus on uncertainty acknowledges both the fact that we cannot know what will happen next, and the continually emergent nature of the environments we inhabit and of the configurations of circumstances that constitute our everyday worlds. This involves putting a concept of emergence, which has been forwarded by design anthropologists such as Rachel Charlotte Smith and Ton Otto, as well as in my own collaborations with Yoko Akama and Shanti Sumartojo, at the centre of our thinking. Following this approach therefore, enables us to understand the ambiance that we feel and sense, to be similarly part of a process of continuous emergence. Therefore, rather than being pre-figured, ambiance is the continually experienced outcome of the circumstances that we find ourselves in.

Therefore, design anthropology engages with the possible and recognises anticipated futures as experiences and feelings that emerge in the present, rather than as predictable products that will either succeed or fail. Here ethnography in both its form of exploring how people experience the ambiance of art, and in the auto-ethnographic stance through which an artist might reflectively anticipate future encounters with her or his practice, presents a mode of knowing about ambiance. The reflexive artist as auto-ethnographer accounts for the question of how to create art that opens up ambient possibilities for its audience. It is impossible to orchestrate the feelings that people will experience when they encounter art, simply because the circumstances of these experiences will always be contingent and audiences will improvise with their own ways of knowing to create meanings. Yet by auto-ethnographically documenting their own feelings, practices and hopes through drawing, writing, audio or video recording in the process of making, artists can create an archive of sensory knowing. This can be compared with in-depth ethnographic explorations with those who experience art, to explore how the experiential possibilities it afforded meet with the artists assumptions and hopes. Such research involves collaborative audio and video recorded explorations with participants, using these and other written or visual modes of expressing what these experiences have been like. These stages of working ethnographically can be interwoven in the ongoing process of creation and reflection, as the artists’ understanding of their own imaginative and anticipatory modes grows, and their understanding of how people experience ambient circumstances cumulatively influences the evolution of practice.

4. Philip Samartzis Notes from the Front Line

If I’d stayed at college I would have become a teacher
Syd Barrett

Variable resistance

The relationship between sound art and the institution is an interesting topic within the context of this exhibition. The post WW2 period is littered with artists, technicians and researchers working within institutional frameworks to advance the theory and practice of sound—from design and generation, to choreography and arrangement, and finally articulation and encounter. Historically, the institution provided the finance, expertise and technology to facilitate a research agenda designed to advance the understanding and appreciation of audition and perception. The evolution of electronic music studios and their attendant research groups including the INA-GRM, IRCAM, WDR, STEIM, NHK, et al, are well documented, however, alternative organisations such as art schools and colleges hold an equally important role in promoting the sonic arts. While theorists and historians argue over the merits of analogue tape over digital sound generation, resourceful students draw on broken speakers, cheap microphones, and portable hand held recorders to produce a vibrant and dynamic music. More importantly, art schools and colleges are places where equality, gender identity, and cultural diversity flourish. Through a quixotic mix of ability and experience, a sound field is produced that is arguably more potent than anything to come out of the vacuum tubes and variable resistors of the consoles and amplifiers utilised within state funded research institutions. The Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio is a noteworthy exception for using a model established by independent radio broadcasters, whereby rarefied technology is accessed through a subscriber system, circumventing the hierarchical structure governing access to similarly appointed studios.

A history of forgetting

It can be argued that the narrative that consistently informs contemporary sound discourse is historically shallow, thematically narrow and culturally deficient. A discourse that rarely contravenes the hegemony of scholarship materialising from the northern hemisphere.

History is often articulated from a self-serving perspective—one that recursively folds back on itself to produce narratives reinforcing intellectual and cultural dominance. It is a position where Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897) is neglected for John Cage’s Silence (1961). Where hermit and inventor Knud Viktor is marginalised from the history of acoustic ecology, and yet whose innovations predate the Canadian soundscape movement. Where the destructive impulse of Milan Knizak’s Broken Music (1964), which anticipates Christian Marclay by twenty years, is reduced to a footnote. Historians seem good at forgetting, and really good at restating a past that gets shallower with the passing of time. Sound history is as endangered an ecology as the concepts, technologies and structures that once supported it. A crepuscular world where the shoots planted by Cage, Schaeffer and Schafer are the only remnants occupying a once fecund garden. If you place your ear against the weeds however, you may hear Persopolis (1972) by Iannis Xenakis—a work detested by Schaeffer for its brutality and dissonance, yet perennially loved by fans of noise and industrial music.

Sound art is for everyone

Sound art seems to be commonplace within contemporary art and music. Once the bête noire of fine art, sound is now integrated into numerous hybrid and transdisciplinary practices. No longer marginalised to rarefied exhibitions, or specialised festivals and record labels, it is an integral part of the fine art experience through multichannel and immersive installations, live art and performance projects, and through the intersection of audio-visual practices. The process of absorption has been so successful that it could be argued that sound as a distinct and independent discipline is now a somewhat redundant concept. Computer and mobile technologies, along with pervasive forms of communication and distribution, offer new ways of incorporating sound into various categories of fine art production to expand temporal and spatial interactions and flows. Once the province of highly guarded knowledge and specialised know-how, sound practices are increasingly populated by generalist approaches and everyday electronics.

Detuning the world

Most of the Australian artists in this exhibition are graduates of the School of Art at RMIT University. Sound has occupied a liminal position within the school since it was introduced into the fine art program in the late 1970s. While staff and students come and go, a spirit of independence, of being outsiders within the system remains. Sound has always been a problem for the academy for one reason or another. Its history doesn’t fit neatly into the story of art, nor the story of music. Its practice is oftentimes loud, sometimes obnoxious, occasionally poetic. It has a tendency to fill space with a tactile and immersive presence that overwhelms delicate sensibilities. Pierre Henry declared that working with sound is like waging war on a daily basis—challenging tradition, disrupting complacency, and confronting the arbiters of taste. For some critics and audiences, sound is simply too hard, just as abstract painting was too hard until it was eventually subsumed and commodified for the masses. A case in point is Bridget Riley’s Movement in Squares (1961) which demonstrates the dynamic potentialities of optical phenomena that anticipates the aural and optical art of Ryoji Ikeda. The success of Ikeda’s much lauded series of data streams suggests the long transition of sound art from margin to centre is now complete.

Broken nose

Before writing this essay, I asked the artists what sound art means to them today. Only some responded but the answer was more or less consistent: that it is perceptual; that it’s all around us; and that it is something that should be listened to. This exhibition uses site responsive practice to draw attention to atmosphere and ambiance. While the works are new, the practice of responding to a site and its attendant complexities is well established. When engaging with these works it is worth thinking about precedents. Eric Satie’s Musique d’Ameublement (1917) provides a good starting point as it was specifically composed to function as background ambiance to social gatherings. I am also reminded of Martin Hannett and his use of digital reverb and delay to create lugubrious spaces for bands infatuated by the abject. The broadband thrum filtering through the Yarra Sculpture Gallery from nearby Hoddle Street is reminiscent of Vittorio Gelmetti’s dense electronic soundscapes for Red Desert (1964). The repetitive sound of the train line running perpendicular to the gallery could be lifted from a 1980s Jean-Marc Vivenza album of stark industrial noise. Sound may be omnipresent, and anything these days may pass as sound art, yet I would argue that it is its connection to the mavericks, innovators and the lunatic fringe that provides it with its enduring charm and legacy. For this we have people like Jean Dubuffet to thank, whose composition Broken Nose (1960) demonstrates that anyone can be a musician, and that sound is as much about play as it is about perception.

Australian Research Council for funding Jordan Lacey’s Discovery Early Career Researchers Grant, which has helped support the realisation of this exhibition.

Yarra City Council for funding support to help realise the creation of the catalogue.

RMIT University School of Art and SIAL Sound Studios for supporting the realisation of this exhibition through funding, technical support and artistic materials.

Ari Sharp, artist, curatorial assistant and technician, whose keen eye, ear and mind has been invaluable to the exhibition’s realisation.

Public Office, for the design of this catalogue.

Finally, thank you to Jean-Paul Thibaud, Sarah Pink and Philip Samartzis, for supporting the exhibition with their insightful essays.