Abstract

Before the digital age, humans spent years in training to gain matured physical fidelity and versatility necessary to become professionals in music, which nowadays is often called the organization of sound. As the concept of sound art expands and becomes more diverse and inclusive of various practices and activities made possible through the technological advancements of our era, the organization of sound in artworks no longer necessarily requires time restrictions or physicality. We certainly don’t know how expansively this “between categories” genre will develop yet. This essay presents the background thought process, through social and cultural perspectives, behind an in-progress sound art project to create a paean and elegy of human mortality through a self-driven artistic composition. The self-termed PhysiMusiking practice led this artist to self-study a musical instrument and yoga movements. The journey of building new craftsmanship, by itself, is part of the experiment in unifying original auditory-visual expressions, somewhat similar to visual music. The multiple-year project was initiated in November of 2017 in Hong Kong with an announcement of the imprecise future schedule of three-tier, evolving stages leading to the final assembly in South Korea.

• Irene Eunyoung Lee has been acting as a sound artist in South Korea under the pseudonym ARING. Over the course of a wide-ranging career, she has worked as a composer, producer, performer, writer, video artist, cognitive researcher, educator, and photographer. The artist endeavors to accentuate the spiritual-purificatory role of art by taking mundane existential stories of life as general and intellectual states, and maneuvering them into insightful ritualistic art practices through a serial project called the Sound Diary. Her creative, genre-disrupting, unconventional original works integrate a variety of artistic media, including music/sound, dance, movement, lighting, visual images, and texts, through performances and exhibitions. The author uses the components of music and various media formats to portray delicate occurrences in living a life (based on storytelling), being attentive to inner self and others. Behind each work is an extensive process of introspection and exploration, involving sketches of the endeavor through a series of written texts, tangible performances, and free-form sound organizations. For more information about the series, visit the project website (sonicart.co/sound-diary-project) or the artist’s vimeo page (vimeo.com/aring).

Full text (PDF) p. 378-382