Jonas Siig – Denmark (December 2011)
Based in Denmark, I currently work as a PhD scholar at the Doctoral School in Arts and Aesthetics at the University of Aarhus where I am fully absorbed in a project on field recording and the notion of sonic reality. My work is oftentimes philosophical though seldom rigid or by any means puritan as I draw on a broad background in the arts and humanities as well as selected methodologies from anthropology, ethnography and various types of cultural studies.
Being an aesthetician at heart, I have for a number of years worked on analyzing and theorizing seemingly disjointed fragments of recorded media with a particular fondness of sound and phonography. My studies often attempt to explore the limits of epistemology in guise of »that which can still be known«. Alternating between representational and phenomenological strategies has allowed me to appreciate the paradoxical relationship between what »sound« potentially means as opposed to what it is. That is, to hear either »a lion« or »a lion’s roar« in the same recorded sound carries radically different implications pertaining to fundamentally diverse modes of listening. Locating (by either chance or analysis) certain fields, artifacts and practices in which these particular stances can inform rather than antagonize each other has become a primary concern of mine and it pervades much of my ongoing research.
RESEARCH
In line with the nature of my general research project, my contribution to the work at the Sound Archive of Experimental Music and Sound Art will be based on an attempt to articulate »art« and »aesthetic practice« as two disparate, yet discursively interwoven modes of sound work elicited by diverging enunciative mechanisms. Such a typology could, if approached with proper caution, contribute to the way we analyze sonic phenomena that possess both artistic and aestheto-practical ramifications, e.g. field recording. The differentiation will be used prismatically in parallel analyses of materials found in the archive itself in order to test the viability of this approach.
+info: http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/
contact: aestjls@hum.au.dk
