Expert Tour: What is music to … media-culture(s) / media-art(s) / human post-digital culture(s)

From a disembodied culture of information to the physical life of a culture of communication – music & social virtualities

The Sound-Art-Parcours is a long-standing Ars Electronica tradition. The tour traverses the plurality of relationship spaces of music / sound art and the media arts by listening. Theoretical reflection and conversations with the artists, personal as well as individual physical experience, experiencing, immersing oneself in the mediality of sound. It enables intensive and guided encounters with worlds of sound, but also with those medial worlds that are shaped after hearing. This year’s Sound Walk will take place on the JKU Linz campus.

It is not only about music and yet it is about music – music is a media art since the instrumentalization of the excited body, the body in tension, in e-motion, at latest since its mediatization by codes, by notation – the com-position, compilation of codes for sounds is the birth of the “work”, polyphony the ” objectification of the we”. In this, music is the paradigm of the formative interaction of the hedonic body with virtualities, especially in post-digital cultures after the transgression of the mechanistic system in digital culture. In this, music is seen as the formalization of bodily arousal, of bodily, emotional movement through movement in the environment and the shaping of that environment in interaction with the listening and sounding body – the specificity of the listening body, the concept of “sound-gesture,” is formalized in music. It is about the paradigm of “hearing” as an adequate form of interaction of bodies and thus about the design of human social virtualities, it is about the aesthetic and ethical implications of the corporeal communal life in the everyday life of an “auditory culture”. The demand of modernity, the thinking of the vision ” art living” obtains a viable form in the dynamic of “doing life” through “doing music” – “doing music” through “doing life” …
Epistemological media art is the ” listening ” field, cognitively shaping this post-digital culture through the bodily experience.

It is the transgression of the seeing body and its embodied cognitions in the formation of the mechanistic system as a worldview, conditioned by its mediatization: dynamization and virtualization have transcended the possibilities of the mechanical body, the hedonic body “seizes” events in the “all-at-onceness” of medial environments and shapes them “algorithmically” through its interaction. Nevertheless, its behavior is directed according to its needs — worlds, shaped in interaction according to the paradigm of listening, are body-at-onceness medial worlds, they form themselves in “auditory cultures” as human cultures.

A production of the Ars Electronica Research Institute “auditory culture“

Ablauf