Spring 2019

Spring 2019

INT 185ST/INT 201SC: Sound in Contemporary Practice
Instructor: Laurel Beckman
Friday (Time and Location TBD)
2 credits
The exploration and creation of sound in art, both as support for other media and as an art-form in itself. This studio-based course will place creative work in the context of contemporary practice and media theory, giving students multiple points of entry to working with, and critically discussing, sound. Through hands-on exercises, readings, and in-class discussion and critique, we will move quickly from production techniques, theoretical and art-historical background to presentation of student artwork and research. The study of sound touches many disciplines, from media art to cultural studies, from linguistics to the history of science and technology, to physics, biology, ecology, psychology and philosophy. As such, this course—while firmly situated as a studio art course—benefits from a wide range of experience and interests. Each meeting will focus on a different aspect of sound, including but not limited to: active listening, attention and cognition, recording and surveillance, performance, signal processing and modulation, sound / image relationships, installation, spatialization, and “non-cochlear” sound—how culture, language, and context shape how we hear, and how we conceptualize sound. Diverse artists and text references may include Lawrence Abu-Hamdan, Maryanne Amacher, Thomas Ashcraft, Joseph Beuys, Augusto Boal, James Lee Byars, John Cage, Isa Genzken, Christine Sun Kim, Pope L., Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Pauline Oliveros, Laura Poitras, Ultra Red, Hildegard Westerkamp, Iannis Xenakis, Cornelius Cardew, Michel Chion, Liz Lerman, Pauline Oliveros, Ultra Red, Pierre Schaeffer, R. Murray Schafer, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Silvan Tomkins, Stuart Hall.

Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck constitute the art collaborative known as “Lucky Dragons”. Lucky Dragons is a Los Angeles based collaborative music and art project researching forms of participation and dissent, purposefully working towards a better understanding of existing ecologies through performances, publications, recordings. and public art. Lucky Dragons have presented collaborative work in a wide variety of contexts, including REDCAT, LACMA, MOCA and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, The Kitchen in New York, the 54th Venice Biennale, Documenta 14, The Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial) and The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. The name “lucky dragons” is borrowed from a fishing vessel that was caught in the fallout from H-bomb tests in the mid-1950’s, an incident which sparked international outcry and gave birth to the worldwide anti-nuclear movement. For more information, contact Laurel Beckman at beckman@arts.ucsb.edu.