Certainly, there is not nor will there ever be an objective criterion for determining absolute truth or eternal validity even within one work of art, just as no scientific “truth” is ever definitive. But in addition to these two modes, inferential and experimental, art exists in a third mode, one of immediate revelation which is neither inferential nor experimental.
[...] The revelation of beauty occurs immediately, directly, to someone ignorant of art as well as to the connoisseur. This is the strength of art and, so it seems, its superiority over the sciences. Art, while living the two dimensions of inference and experimentation, possesses this third and most mysterious dimension which permits art objects to escape any aesthetic science while still enjoying the caresses of inference and experimentation.
[...] This greater complexity of the fundamental system of the three modes which govern art leads to the conclusion that art is richer and vaster and must necessarily initiate condensations and coagulations of intelligence; therefore, serve as a universal guide to the other sciences.
Iannis Xenakis (Art/Science: Alloys, Sharon Kanach 2019)
[...] music is a strong condenser, the strongest, perhaps, of all the arts.
Iannis Xenakis (Art/Science: Alloys, Sharon Kanach 2019)
A broader understanding of acoustic space is what I’m after: I’m really talking about different dimensions of the kind of subjectivity that we produce in networked environments. This dimension is profound, and we should consider it, work with it, explore it.
Erik Davis (1997)
The body', writes Judith Butler (1988, p. 521), 'is an historical idea and a set of possibilities to be realized. . . . [It is] a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities'. Realizing the body through its interface with sound and space opens new possibilities of becoming for the body, stretching its old limits and creating new ones. Where sound, body and space meet, new dimensions of, and sensitivities towards, environments can be engaged, and our relationship to these and to ourselves and each other within these can be re-imagined and transformed.
Gascia Ouzounian (2006)
Afterword
Notes on method: Cultivating seeing with closed eyes
This exposition assembles a body of resources and practices into a research curriculum for investigating design/composition in the spatiotemporal domain and exploring the potential and materiality of aesthetic experience in VR and spatial audio media. Since the nature of such experiences, we find, cannot be apprehended with traditional disciplines, we use the notion of spatiotemporality, a concept that is adopted from the theory of relativity in physics and rejects space and time as a priori categories, fusing them instead into a complex. Similarly, in our case, spatiotemporality, on the one hand, institutes a complex at the intersections of disciplinary aesthetics and knowledge as an “expanded field” (Krauss, 1979) that defies partial understandings, and on the other hand, through the institution of new conditions of “space,” as in physics, enables new forms and understandings of subjectivity and eventually collectivity.
Thus, this research program develops on the basis of a deep-interdisciplinarity, or un-disciplinarity (see Linder, 2005; and "mode 2" research in Dunin-Woyseth et al. 2011). It also cultivates processes of unlearning, for the purpose of unhinging notions of space and time from disciplinary biases as well as fragmentary understandings of the aesthetic. This questioning of the historical and disciplinary traditions, modes, and origins of our sensing and understanding is a gesture of generosity (Bühlmann, 2017) toward the potential of our sensory and sense-making capacities, and by extension, our art and artistic expression.
Accordingly, the research trajectory followed is neither solely theoretical nor practical. It aims to organically fuse theory and practice, and art and science, thereby forming "alloys" between different modes of knowing, in Xenakis' terms (Kannach, 2019), while at the same time maintaining the artistic as the guiding principle in these investigations. It proceeds, therefore, through speculation, in Shaviro’s (2019) two-fold understanding, as the production of new possibilities in the extrapolation of probabilities; namely, the production of new aesthetic possibilities in the extrapolation of disciplinary probabilities and capacities. The vehicle of speculation allows us to find entry points for investigating and harvesting the potential of the new technological “materials” (Bratton, 2016) for the purposes of exploration and materialization of our bodies' latent sensory and sense-making capacities (Ouzounian, 2006).
Consequently, this corpus stands for the fostering of a knowledge and form of knowing that is simultaneously theoretical and conceptual, as well as practiced, experiential, and corporeal. The example of the workshop, which the exposition presents, where architecture students were “immersed” in the process of cultivating aural visuality through spatiotemporal design, shows that such transdisciplinary exercises are not only possible. First and foremost, open-ended processes of unlearning, sensing, and learning-together uncover promising new spectra of expression and creativity: new ways of knowing in latent capacities of intelligence and sensibility waiting to be discovered.
Constantinos Miltiadis is an architect who studies temporal structures.
Gerriet K. Sharma is a composer who studies spaces.
References
Bratton, Benjamin, “On Speculative Design”, presented at the Speculative Design undergraduate program launch, University of California, San Diego, February 10, 2016 <http://dismagazine.com/discussion/81971/on-speculative-design-benjamin-h-bratton/>
Bühlmann, Vera, “Abstraction and Generosity”, Keynote lecture presented at Sophistication: Rhetorical, Geometrical, and Computational “Articulation”: A symposium on architecture, technics, theory, and thinking, TU Vienna, December, 2017 <https://www.academia.edu/35434920/Abstraction_and_Generosity_On_Intellectuality_today; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaaJikOpkm0>
Davis, Erik, “Acoustic Cyberspace”, Xchange On-Air Session, November 11, 1997 <https://techgnosis.com/acoustic-cyberspace/>
Dunin-Woyseth, Halina, and Fredrik Nilsson, “Building (Trans)Disciplinary Architectural Research – Introducing Mode 1 and Mode 2 to Design Practitioners”, in Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production in Architecture and Urbanism, edited by Isabelle Doucet and Nel Janssens, 79–96, (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2011). <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0104-5_6>
Kanach, Sharon, ARTS/SCIENCES: ALLOYS, Intelligent Arts Inc., 2019.
Krauss, Rosalind, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, October 8 (1979), 31–44.
Linder, Mark, “TRANSdisciplinarity”, Hunch, 9 (2005), 12–15.
Ouzounian, Gascia, “Embodied Sound: Aural Architectures and the Body”, Contemporary Music Review 25, no. 1–2 (February 2006), 69–79 <https://doi.org/10.1080/07494460600647469>
Shaviro, Steven, ed. by Frederic Neyrat, “Defining Speculation: Speculative Fiction, Speculative Philosophy, and Speculative Finance”, Alienocene - Stratum, no. 6 (2019). <https://alienocene.com/2019/12/23/stratum-6/>
Extended workshop syllabus
Aarseth, Espen J, “Allegories of Space. The Question of Spatiality in Computer Games”, in Cybertext Yearbook 2000, ed. by Raine Koskimaa and Markku Eskelinen, 44–47 (Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2001)
———. “Virtual Worlds, Real Knowledge: Towards a Hermeneutics of Virtuality”. European Review 9.2 (2001), 227–232
Blesser, Barry, and Linda-Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007)
———. ‘The Other Half of the Soundscape: Aural Architecture’, in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 15 (2009)
Bollnow, Otto Friedrich, “Lived-Space”, Philosophy Today, 5.1 (1961), 31–39
Borch, Christian (CB), “Architectural Atmospheres : On the Experience and Politics of Architecture”, n.d., 112
Chalmers, David J, “The Virtual and the Real”, Disputatio, 2016.
Eliasson, Olafur, “The Future Is Curved”, Architectural Design, 84.5 (September 2014), 86–93. <https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.1813>
Emmerson, Simon, “Aural Landscape: Musical Space”, Organised Sound, 3.2 (August 1998), 135–40 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771898002064>
Fowler, Michael, “Sounds in Space or Space in Sounds? Architecture as an Auditory Construct”, Architectural Research Quarterly, 19.1 (March 2015), 61–72 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S1359135515000226>
Fraser, Benjamin, “Why the Spatial Epistemology of the Video Game Matters: Metis, Video Game Space and Interdisciplinary Theory”, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 3.2 (2011), 93–106
Harvey, Auriea, and Michaël Samyn, “Realtime Art Manifesto” Gaming Realities: The Challenge of Digital Culture, Mediaterra Festival of Art and Technology, Athens, 2006 <http://tale-of-tales.com/tales/RAM.html>
Harvey, David, “Space as a Keyword”, in Inaugural Conference (London: Institute of Education, University of London, 2004)
Heilig, Morton Leonard, “El Cine Del Futuro: The Cinema of the Future”, Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 1.3 (1955 1992), 279–294
Jenkins, Henry, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”, Computer, 44 (2004), 53
Kolb, David, “Real Places in Virtual Spaces”, Nordic Journal of Architectural Research 3 (2006), 69–77
Krauss, Rosalind, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, October, 8 (1979), 31–44
Malham, David G, “Toward Reality Equivalence in Spatial Sound Diffusion”, Computer Music Journal, 25.4 (December 2001), 31–38 <https://doi.org/10.1162/01489260152815279>
Manovich, Lev, “Navigable Space”, in The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001), 251-252 <http://manovich.net/content/04-projects/021-navigable-space/18_article_1998.pdf>
Novak, Marcos, “Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace”, in Cyberspace: First Steps, edited by Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 225-54.
———. “The Music of Architecture”, n.d.
Oswalt, Philipp, “Iannis Xenakis’ Polytopes”, Contemporary Music Review, 21, no. 2–3 (June 2002), 35–44 <https://doi.org/10.1080/07494460216658>
Ouzounian, Gascia, “Embodied Sound: Aural Architectures and the Body”, Contemporary Music Review, 25, no. 1–2 (February 2006), 69–79 <https://doi.org/10.1080/07494460600647469>
Penny, Simon, “Virtual Reality as the Completion of the Enlightenment Project”, in Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology, ed. by Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckrey, Discussions in Contemporary Culture 9 (Seattle: BayPress, 1994) 231-48
Sieß, Andreas, Sandra Beuck, and Matthias Wölfel, “Virtual Reality – Quo Vadis? How to Address the Complete Audience of an Emerging Technology”, n.d., 11
Smalley, Denis, “Space-Form and the Acousmatic Image”, Organised Sound, 12.1 (2007), 35–58.
———. “Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes”, Organised Sound, 2.2 (1997), 107–126.
Tanaka, Jun, “From (Im) Possible to Virtual Architecture”, in The Virtual Architecture: The Difference between Possible and Impossible in Architecture, translated by Thomas Donahue (Tokyo: Tokyo University Digital Museum, 2000) <http://umdb.um.u-tokyo.ac.jp/DKankoub/Publish_db/1997VA/english/02.html>
Thrift, Nigel, “Movement-Space: The Changing Domain of Thinking Resulting from the Development of New Kinds of Spatial Awareness”, Economy and Society, 33.4 (November 2004), 582–604 <https://doi.org/10.1080/0308514042000285305>
Tschumi, Bernard, “The Architectural Paradox”, in Architecture Theory Since 1968, ed. by K. Michael Hays, New edition (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000), 218-27
Tversky, Barbara, “Spatial Cognition: Embodied and Situated”, 2009
Worrall, David, “Space in Sound: Sound of Space”, Organised Sound, 3.2 (August 1998), 93–99 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771898002027>
Authors' relevant teaching and publication activities
Miltiadis, C., “Virtual Reality, Videogames, Architecture and Education. From Utopian Drawings to Inconstructible Navigable Environments”, in Computing for a Better Tomorrow - Proceedings of the 36th ECAADe Conference, ed. by A Kepczynska-Walczak and S Bialkowski, 2:815–24. Lodz, Poland: Lodz University of Technology, 2018 <http://papers.cumincad.org/cgi-bin/works/paper/ecaade2018_366>
See also: Virtual Spaces Master Studio: a curriculum for experimental architectural design in VR, developed and taught by Constantinos Miltiadis at the Institute of Architecture and Media, Architecture Faculty, TU Graz. For the 2016 and 2017 iterations respectively see <http://studioany.com/teaching/vsms2017/ > and <http://studioany.com/teaching/virtual-spaces-iam-2016/>
Miltiadis, C., ‘Oblivious to Gravity: Virtual Architecture between Disciplinary Dead Ends and Complex Intersections’, Archidoct, Variability, 8.1 (2020), 24–37 <http://www.archidoct.net/Issues/vol8_iss1/ArchiDoct_vol7_is3_Variability_3.Miltiadis.pdf>
——— “The Architectural Continuum: Choropoietic Media and Post-Physical-World Environments”, in Architectonics of Game Spaces. The Spatial Logic of the Virtual and Its Meaning for the Real, ed. by Andri Gerber and Ulrich Götz, Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript (2019), 183-99 <https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-4802-7/architectonics-of-game-spaces/>
Sharma G.K., "Surrounded by Immersion - Means of Post-Democratic Warfare", in Ultrablack of Music, ed. by Szepanski, A. (Mille Plateaux, Frankfurt a. M., 2020)
——— "Aural Sculpturality. Spatio-temporal Phenomena within Auditive Media Techniques", ZKM/Hertz-Labor (Hg.), April 2019 ZKM
Wendt F., Sharma G.K., Zotter F., Frank M., Höldrich R., "Perception of Spatial Sound Phenomena Created by the Icosahedral Loudspeaker", in Computer Music Journal, Special Issue on High-Density Loudspeaker Arrays 44.1 (2017)
Sharma G.K., "Composing Sculptural Sound Phenomena in Computer Music" (Dissertation, University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (AT), 2016)
Reither S., Sharma G.K., Bergmann N., "How does a room sound? Staging of spaces through appropriation and choreography of architectural sound material" (German), in Movement Material, Production and Materiality in Dance and Performance, ed. by Skrandies T. u. Kelter K. (Transcript Publishing House, 2016)
Sharma G.K., Zotter F., Frank M., "Towards Understanding and Verbalizing Spatial Sound Phenomena in Electronic Music", in Proceedings InSonic (2015), ZKM Karlsruhe (DE)
Sharma G.K., Bergmann N., " {kA}: Oblivious to Gravity, introduction to building sound-compositions in (half-) public space and report on an aural approach to the historic building of the Old Tannery Murau", in Yearbook Immersive Media, Kiel (DE), 2014
Sharma G.K., "{kA}: Oblivious to Gravity. building sound-compositions in (half-) public spaces (German)", in Staging and Effects - the magic of scenography, Edition by Ralf Bohn and Heiner Wilharm, transcript, 2013
See also Research Catalogue expositions Oblivious to Gravity and Orchestrating Space by Icosahedral Loudspeaker [OSIL] 2014-2019.
Double presentations, by both authors, similar to the one contributed to the public programme of the festival:
'The situation of space in contemporary media environments - Space-Writing Within Architecture’s Expanded Field / Spatial Aesthetics in Auditive Media Composition' New Media Seminar, Aalto ARTS, Helsinki, March 19, 2020. <https://blogs.aalto.fi/mediatutkimus/2020/03/19/new-media-doctoral-remote-seminar/>
Towards the Expanded Field: experimental and interdisciplinary approaches to immaterial spatiotemporal environments -- together with Stephan Günzel. Haus der Architektur, Graz, March 7, 2018 <http://studioany.com/projects/expandedfield/>
The authors are founding members of SAR-SIG 'Spatial Aesthetics and Artificial Environments', established in 2020, devoted to the transdisciplinary exploration of spatiotemporal aesthetics and novel media.