Panel Statement
Panel: Voicing Electronic Arts
The digitally mediated world is a gigantic magnet, an organising force for generating regulatory activities and ruling their functions across its magnetic field. The task for critics is to map or – even better in a sense – to electrify other forces operating within the dominant forces that generate social pressures. From this perspective, the paper proposes the term magnetic – which I have coined – as an implement that invites us to re-think the artwork beyond its material presence and actual signification in digital culture. The magnetic refers to a particular connection between art and politics in the age of global capitalism. The paper aims to offer an understanding of looking and listening as central to the process of inventive and creative interpretation of the world and the making of knowledge of the world. Dealing with the element of voice and sound in installation works, the discussion in the paper will be centred on the idea that audiovisual artwork can behave like a magnet by either pulling things and people towards itself as well as to each other or pushing them apart. The magnetic is the other name of performativity involving the mapping of the invisible, the temporal, the detachable, the connectible, the reversible, the modifiable.
- Nermin Saybasili is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul, Turkey. She received her doctorate in visual culture from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her research interests include contemporary art practices and critical theory with a particular emphasis on ‘visibilities’ and ‘invisibilities’ in the regime of the vision, the ‘element’ of sound and voice in installation work and video art, and urban space and migration in the networked culture. Saybasili’s most recent publications include essays in Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media Art eds. Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo Van Leeuwen (The MIT Press, 2010) and Globalization and Contemporary Art ed. Jonathan Harris (Wigley-Blackwell, forthcoming). Her book Borders and Ghosts will be published in Turkish by Metis Publishing House in 2011.
Full text (PDF) p. 2150-2155