Panel Statement

Panel: Sound Government Always Leads to Revolution

RPM will deal with the very physical (and physiological) relationships established between Sound, the Body, Memory, History and Architecture. This nexus will be explored and counterposed with the incremental disembodiment of aural experience within the histories of recorded sound, where the spatiality so vital for the fundamental operational categories of sound experience, surroundedness, immersion, directionality and depth have been effectively restrained within a representational schema. Such a repression of the architecture of spatio-temporality is not dissimilar to the digital processing of sound which promises to return the collapsed ambient space as Virtual Space, where time and space are naturalistically re-deployed as metaphors literally standing-in for themselves. But why should we be interested in such faux Newtonian reconstructions in which visual grammars cuckold the metaphoric richness of aural experience – only to finally lose perspective in the Virillian chimera of speedspace? – a domain in which sound simply disappears! Can the experiential world of sound be reinstated to coexist with the representational domain of vision?

• Dr. Nigel Helyer (Australia), Senior Lecturer at the Sculpture, Performance and Installation Studio, Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney