This Wednesday, January 31, I will be performing video on an evening with Nettle at Club Transmediale in Berlin.

It looks to be an excellent lineup best articulated by mudd up!

the night, Crossings, looks promising:The A-Trio (with everyone’s favorite Beiruiti cartoonist/blogger/free improv musico, Mazen Kerbaj), the Sublime Frequencies crew (why yes, SubFreq used my friends’ music and images on their Radio Morocco CD with no attribution or permission or payment whatsoever!), and the Staalplaat Soundsystem.

and…

DJ NRON will be performing with dj/rupture in Hamburg on the 2nd at golden pudel~!

so hope to see you there.

below is a photo from a nettle performance this past summer at Paradiso, Amsterdam, avec video pour moi.…

I had the pleasure of working again recently with Vito Acconci and his architecture studio.
Perform-A-Seat, up now until February 10 at D’Amelio Terras gallery in Chelsea, is a furniture prototype and installation.
Acconci wanted to design lights and sound for the piece, so, with the dedicated help of Dana Karwas, we programmed and a complex series of light and audio sequences. We used the standard Mac Mini, Max/MSP/Jitter and an Arduino setup, and I was excited to learn the finer points of LED lamps and voltage secrets. Acconci and I also recorded and designed his voice to eminate from the piece, with a series of narratives from which was derived the title of the show:

“The Loss of History makes them Constantly Curious and Continuously Horny”

The gallery site has a nice slideshow, but of course, if you want to the full experience, a visit is always recommended.

Last night at drinks on the lower east side, i was asked to explain what a sound designer is. On this occasion, I had the fortune of being with my friend who is a graphic designer and art director, and it made for an interesting comparison.

As is often the case, i predicated my claim with the usual series of “well, it seems to me” and/or “i really don’t know anything, but…” and began to try to explain. I used the regular examples, of how if I were designing the bar, we would begin with a blank slate, add voice, drinks, laughter, whispers, energy, and of course music etc., and then place them in a room or space, or spaces…

And we reflected on how design has a strange relationship between the part and the whole, such that sounds might be like words in a book design for example, and that the space might be like the paper and binding of that same book..and then we had another drink and moved on…

Unfortunately, what i really wanted to say was, well, I can tell you what I think sound design is, but I don’t really see so much difference between sound design and design per se.

The best book I know for design theory is a collection of essays by Vilem Flusser, The shape of things: a philosophy of design

He is, of course, not a designer in the traditional sense, but a philosopher. The opening paragraph from one essay…

On the word design: an etymological essay

In the English language, the word “design” is both a nound and a ver, a situation that is particularly characteristic of that language. As a noun, it can mean, a “purpose,”plan,” “intention,” “goal,” “malicious intent,” “plot,” “form,” or “fundamental structure.” These and other definitions are related to “cunning” and “craftiness.” As a verb, “to design” means, among other things, “to concoct something,” “to feign or simulate,” “to draft,” “to sketch,” “to shape,” or “to proceed strategically.” The word is derived from the Latin word “signum” [”sign” in English and Zeichen in german]. “Signum” and “Zeichen” have the same ancient root. So etymologically, “design” means to “draw a sign.” The question is, how did the word “design” receive its contemporary international meaning?…..

And that question allows Flusser to explore, like Kittler, the quintessential design force, war. In Flusser’s book, we address the design of the first Gulf War. In Kittler, we see how the military was always the leader in technological development, but somehow, either a mutation or a popularization of that media begins to infiltrate the masses.

How did sound design infiltrate our ears? Was it always-already present, from the first chants heard, or, as David Toop remarked recently at a presentation at Sonic Focus, was it in the amniotic fluid of the mother’s womb? Or was it never designed, since there is no real “sign” in sound? Can we say that sound design is wedded to the creation of signs, signifiers and referents? It seems to me that, while Kittler focuses on the media which pass through the acoustic events (including the throat and body), we could look to these sound designs as “plots,” “fundamental elements,” and as such evade the need for mechanical reproducibilty.

In order to avoid the pitfalls of the ineffability of sound itself (it is quite shifty, “cunning”, as it does, in fact, pass through walls, build and restructure environments, and push air and bodies in all directions), we could, perhaps, begin to try to articulate sound design on the plane of the design of experience itself. This move could help to evade the problem of the extremely personal and metaphoric registers of sound experience, and dovetail with sound production towards to the frameworks of listenening (as Adorno has tried in his work on classical music listening).
We of course also run into the problem of writing sound. This is not academic, but a legitimate concern. When sound design shifts from the register of the (audible) object to the levels of experience, we could speak of this as some sort of “strategic” “shaping.” But could we write of it that way? That is, for sound to be understood or read, must it be heard? As avital ronell has tried in The Telephone Book, do we need to transfigure the form of the written text, to somehow try to imply the work that our ears, brains and bodies do to focus our listening and sensing of sound?
David Toop accompanied his presentation with multiple ipod mixes, his voice mixing in to create an experience that encouraged a deep listening. Again, we are begged to question the speach act as it gets transferred to the written word. Instead of verifying and authenticating the written word, we throw into question it’s very validity as a method of interrogation and evidence. Can we say that the podcast killed the gramaphone? Or have the fordist standards for authenticity been so smudged by the sound design of the podcast that we end up questioning the legality of the claim of the origin.

Again, as Ronell reminds us of Heidegger’s reception of the call from the Nazi party, are we to trust our ears? Could our ears trust the sound from the prosthetic speaker/headphone? Are we pushed to a Habermasian position, where the only true discourse is face to face, intersubjectively situated, unmediated. Designed audio from the voice is, in this sense, designed experience, only mediated by the bodies present, without the electronic normalization. Somehow, this fight for “true” discourse seems that this is a losing battle, as our everyday experience becomes more and more mediated.
Or should we say that to sound design is to engage in malicious intent and cunning, to fool, to decieve, to plan, and at the same time, to believe that someone, somewhere, is listening, or will listen. To design sound is to hope.