Illustration by Sissel Marie Tonn

Editor’s note

This discussion is published as part of The Reading Room series, an event program organised by artists Jonathan Reus, Sissel Marie Tonn and Flora Reznik, and produced by the Instrument Inventors Initiative in collaboration with Stroom Den Haag. The Reading Room is made possible with financial support from Stroom Den Haag and the Creative Industries Fund NL.

The Reading Room #25 and #26, Radiant Matter, took place on the 14th and 21st of June in collaboration with guest readers Raviv Ganchrow and Douglas Kahn, where we discussed transmission, perception and imagination of energetic phenomena.  The reading sessions focused on a collection of short texts, proposed by Raviv, each documenting specific empirical experiments with electromagnetism and transmission spanning the late 19th and early 20th century. These empirical fragments were bookended by David Hartley’s seminal 18th Century text “The Doctrine of vibrations” on the one end, and by chapter 12 of Douglas’ Earth Sound, Earth Signal, “Long Sounds and Transperception” on the other. In the second session we continued with one additional short reading, “Wordcarving, a dream of transmission”, written by Douglas for the occasion of the 2016 Primavera exhibition at the MCA Sydney.

Unfortunately, Raviv Ganchrow was not able to join us for a Relay Conversation-style reflection on the discussions. We instead focus on a discussion with Douglas about the concept of Radiant Matter and questions which arose around his texts “Long Sounds and Transperception” and “Wordcarving, a dream of transmission”.

The Reading Room (TRR): The title of this cluster, “Radiant Matter”, was inspired by a chapter from Earth Sound Earth Signal that we read, “Long Sounds and Transperception”. Inside there is a passage that refers to Henry Thoreau who muses on perception when viewing the landscape of the Concord River: “Heaven intervenes between me and the object—by what license do I call it Concord River?” Douglas, can you expand a bit how this quote relates to your notion of transperception?

Douglas Kahn (DK): In my book the quote occurs as part of a larger passage describing Henry David Thoreau’s observation that landscape, for instance, would not just be the view of a distant hilltop and its supportive surrounds, but also the mist and lens effect of intervening space, in effect, what modulates index. He observes how this would work with “a sound” given the many influences and transformations from a source, itself multivariate, to where it is heard. An inquisitive, learned or tacit awareness of these interventions is at the basis of what I call transperception. It is not merely what is a perception of what is across, over, or beyond, that is, what is already in the trans-, but an ongoing apprehension. It is an active form that immediately locates perception in social

and environmental processes, not just phenomena. Since these are constantly changing there is no culmination, just curiosities and analyses that attempt to open propagation and diffusion, the trans in transit, to other influences, accuracies, possibilities and imaginaries. It makes the world a richer and more political place.

While both visual and audible factors are more easily discernible at distance the principle pertains to all such moments or events, with the ease tested in laboratory settings whose job it is to remove variables. I would add to Thoreau’s image the source of light that scatters upon the hilltop, as well as falls upon intervening space and artefacts, and the tilted wobble of the earth that still disposes a sluggish circadian register now that seasons have become human. Thoreau often thought through such collapses: “All things are subjected to a rotary motion, either gradual and partial or rapid and complete, from the planet and system to the simplest shellfish and pebbles on the beach as if all beauty resulted from an object turning on its own axis.” So the intervening space between himself and the “Concord River” consisted in a putatively unobstructed view not only of the heaven as air, its thermal currents and particulates animated by multi-modulated sunlight, but also the locus of an earth magnitude.

For instance, my recourse to Thoreau in Earth Sound Earth Signal was motivated by an investigation into the artist Joyce Hinterding and the composer Alvin Lucier listening to the natural radio of whistlers. The sounds can be delicate glissandi produced by the electromagnetic bursts of lightning on, literally, the other side of the world, propagated out into the magnetosphere and back, that is, little sounds that have tasted outer space. Because one of the aberrant and destructive effects of global warming is the displacement and intensification of weather events, including thunderstorms, the changed incidence of these beautiful sounds is the product of corporate and state malfeasance. All lightning strikes not only have human in it, they have criminality. A codification of transperception is not required to arrive at such a conclusion; it does, however, instate matters in the quotidian rather than sequester them in exceptional activity.

In terms of sound theory, Thoreau’s experiential observations clarify, situate and complicate the status and very possibility of a sound or the sound of and, by extension, sound per se or sound-as-materiality can be seen from the outset as requiring mechanisms of reduction and deracination.

It is an active form that immediately locates perception in social and environmental processes, not just phenomena. 

For me, understanding sound as but one energy among others among pervasive potential, active and transductive states and processes, introduces a necessary opening reminiscent in past decades to how music opened to sound, and how visual culture had to acknowledge auditory culture, that is, both more accurate and interesting.

TTR: In the Reading Room we had a discussion about the creation of technological artefacts and artworks that make epistemic shifts in science part of common folklore. You mentioned that it was only in the mid-1930’s when a book was published for a popular audience announcing the break between classical Newtonian physics and modern physics. And that artists never really took up the ideas of the new physics until after 1945 with their announcement in the form of the atomic bomb. Similarly, telecommunications lines gave living form to the “speed of a spark”, as a popular imaginary for the speed of light.

In your text “Wordcarving: a dream of transmission”, you bring in a quote from James Turrell: “As human beings, we do drink light in the form of vitamin D through the skin, so we are literally light eaters.” This sort of entanglement seems to be crucial to the kind of phenomena that you are trying to address. How do these examples relate to the kind of tangible 

artefacts and imaginaries you think are necessary to grasp the scientific-epistemic reality of today?

DK: The eminent art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson long ago debunked the myth that Picasso’s cubism and Einstein’s relativity shared a Zeitgeisty synchronicity, and demonstrated in detail that the arts relied instead on the inheritance of an earlier ether physics. I am attempting to observe and configure similarly broad outlines of historical non/alignments of physics and the arts to the present. From a perspective intersecting with sound theory, this seems like an important thing to do given firstly the currency of certain cultural theories of vibration that would not only sit well with the mechanics of the ether, but would have basic problems with propagation not enjoying a medium as such. Then, secondly, there are more sophisticated notions of “quantum ontology” that elevate measurements made in microkelvin atom traps, rising above the extraordinarily shallow floor of quantum behavior, to meld with political theory.

Where the former may be constrained considerably by anachronistic tropes, they are nevertheless more capable of palpable experience across the arts, culture and the quotidian, whereas the latter must find satisfied with analogy. I don’t think this is intrinsic since, as mentioned,

the telecommunications infrastructure of telegraph and telephone lines arcing over horizons lent a vernacular notion of the speed of light, through messages sent almost instantaneously with “the speed of a spark.” It is entirely possible that a widespread distribution of quantum computing or other devices will eventually provide a similar education. Until then, what seems to be missing most is the middle ground between the late-17th century Newtonian basis of vibratory cultural theories and the modern physics that gained scientific traction in the 1920s exercised in quantum cultural theories, that is, a still classical physics of electromagnetism, the cultural incursion of which was introduced in my last book, and a better understanding of thermodynamics, which is taken up, among other things, in the forthcoming collection Energies in the Arts (MIT Press, 2019).

The first text you allude to is Gaston Bachelard’s The New Scientific Spirit (Le nouvel esprit scientifique, 1934), which has been credited with introducing modern physics to a wider intellectual if not popular audience. It should be consulted again in the context of these relationships and in particular the attention to quantum science. Without getting into it, the chapter “Matter and Radiation” relies upon the verification of Einstein’s photoelectric effect during the 1920s with Compton and Raman scattering.

He saves a pride of place for Raman scattering because it differentiates, ever so minutely, why the sky is blue from the dominant (at the time and now), classical and overwhelmingly operative notion of Rayleigh scattering. The schism in Bachelard, between his philosophy of science and his poetics based upon the classical elements, is well known. This is a rare and largely unacknowledged moment where this schism comes close to resolving itself. Compton’s x-rays would not be as conducive to blue-sky thinking.

Bachelard should be consulted again too because the physics of C. V. Raman is at the center increasingly sophisticated instruments capable of live imaging the bio-molecular level. In the late-1920s Raman spectroscopy required exposures over twenty hours whereas during the 1990s they became effectively instantaneous and now real-time imaging is available. At this level, and combined with other techniques, the detectable exchanges, interactions and integrations of different energy registers and material forms are astonishing. The famous percussionist Milford Graves, early participant in the “energy music” of Albert Ayler and others associated with so-called “free jazz” in the 1960s, collaborated recently with the molecular biologist Carlo Ventura in registering the response of live

human stem cells to Graves’ music that itself has been developed in an analysis of heartbeats. The idea is that the introduction of electromagnetic oscillations and mechanical vibrations can assist in steering stem cells toward pluripotency and specific tissue types for regenerative medicine and, in the process, steer notions of music and healing in traditional cultures into new territories.

TRR: In “Wordcarving” you criticise the hegemonic cannon of information sciences, Shannon’s model of communication, as “stick figures seen from the side”. In the discussions that arose you also also criticized current energy studies for their focus on questions of efficiency and power generation – a kind of infrastructural/engineering bias. It would seem that there still isn’t an adequate discourse on energy. We are curious what kind of study of energy you would propose. And especially, how do you include in such a study autoethnographic reports, for example, of Thomas Watson listening to electricity in the air?

DK: My humor may be suffering from problems of transmission. It must be Shannon’s fault for not incorporating tone of

voice, facial expression, body posture and gesticulation in his diagram. The writing you cite, “Wordcarving: A Dream of Transmission,” came upon Shannon’s “transmission” diagram performatively through an internal trajectory generated by an actual dream. The writing itself goes in and out of dream states, much like the hypnagogia, the trading zone between wakefulness and dreaming, that is described toward the beginning. This was in pursuit of a pitch capable of accommodating anything from a brief account of a friend’s mystical experience provoked by her mother’s diagnosis and death, to bad puns, if that is a spectrum. If there was a nod to information theory, it may have been in the erosion of zeros and ones, to a desirous zeros and wants, to lascivious rogue bits of eros and wants. If x-y axes were graphed upon the long desert roadways and steep cliffs of Road Runner, then fine; but I wouldn’t dignify anything I said as criticism.

It was, after all, informed in a preceding comment on how much energy an animation company like Pixar (Dreamworks?) uses in its server farm to ray-trace split ends moving in nuanced gusts of wind and, thus, how a dedicated accuracy to hair contributes disproportionately to global warming.

The writing itself goes in and out of dream states, much like the hypnagogia, the trading zone between wakefulness and dreaming.

Becoming self-reflective, which is what light does on the top of my own head, I then concede, “A world in which cartoon balding is green deserves to die: proof positive that it is cheaper and better to dream. Animation and special effects monopolies need to be broken up into a good night’s sleep.” There must be Hollywood animation producers with Malibu beachfront properties at this very moment wondering whether funny eggs or other hairless characters could delay storm surges from washing away their foundations.

The cartoon motif continued as I referred to the historical precedent in the German comedic Shtickfiguren in the late-18th century. This may sound legitimate but it is a bad pun on stick figures that I invented with the help of Chladni’s Klangfiguren (those badges that wowed philosophers), and shtick being what bad Jewish comedians like myself find difficult to suppress. If I were to take things more seriously then I would probably log how many pages of media theory, having more illustrious intentions than I had in these passages, wear Shannon’s diagram like a cheap tattoo from a drunken night out. It would be different if the diagram’s latent thermodynamics were more energetic and the media theory had an ecological flank.

TRR: At one point you proposed the concept of “fields”, which play a relevant role in your general understanding of sound phenomena. And emphasized that thinking in fields stands in some sort of opposition to Timothy Morton’s more “indexical” ontology. One thing you said that struck us was, “this is not a metaphysics. It is a specification of historical, cultural, scientific and experiential phenomena”. This sounds very important and perhaps you could expand on it?

DK: Any appeal that I may have made to fields merely follows the history of the physical concept of energies extended into cognate, discursive fields, because this has occurred for a very long time already. Again, please refer to the introduction to Energies in the Arts. Object oriented philosophy doesn’t present itself as conducive to a pluralistic approach to energies, which I think is required given that two global scale energy spasms—nuclear weaponry and fossil fuel use producing global warming, instant incineration and a not-so-slow burn—are what promise to kill us. Thus, the imperative, but also built upon one of the players in the holy trinity of matter, energy and information. The only direct philosophical address of a pluralistic

notion of energies that I am aware of was published just last year by Michael Marder: Energy Dreams of Actuality (2017). There is the field of energy humanities, but energy here has almost entirely been equated with sources and systems of fuel and power generation, especially, fossil fuels and their alternatives, which however crucial, of course, is unnecessarily restrictive.

Timothy Morton is a good friend but, unlike him, I am not a philosopher. If I were then I might have been busy concocting an energy oriented ontogeny or some other grand plan instead of snorting out truffles in archives. My background is in artistic practice and political activism that morphed a few decades ago into historical theorization of sound in the arts, in media and science in particular, and then into whatever I might be doing now with respect to energy and ecology. I just don’t share Morton’s enthusiasm for OOO, mostly because I find a disjunctive plenitude and deep nominalism—…by what license do I call it Concord River?—in many of its positions and certainly in its reception to be too similar to shopping lists adrift among the overstocked shelves of capitalism.

Morton’s approach away from the headlines escapes much of this, given all the zones

and allures, but I am not in a position to pressure test philosophical systems since there are so many other (sustainable) fish to fry. I’m driven by understanding conditions and possibilities of practice rather than ontology, doing instead of being, and that is where the “specification of historical, cultural, scientific and experiential phenomena” comes in. I appreciate, of course, that practice and ontology are not mutually exclusive, but even that rumination takes me too far afield. Given pending dynamic phase state shifts in the complex systems of the present climate catastrophe, “being” appears increasingly optimistic. Good news is that it is not yet presumptuous.

I do share Morton’s drive to address ecological matters in a fundamentally different way. About ten years ago his Ecology without Nature along with Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet were very important for me personally to start thinking about ecology differently. When I was closer to purse strings I was able to bring them both to Australia. But, as I’ve written before, I can’t throw the nature baby out with the rising bathwater (sorry, I’m uncertain how far that idiom travels). Within practice, jettisoning nature has widely productive but not blanket applicability.

Until the last five years, for example, historical media theory had no nature—engineering, sociology, business, etc., but effectively no ecology apart from programming content. Telecommunications in the nineteenth century effectively industrialized electromagnetism at the same time it was discovered, there was no separate nature to exploit; there was no natural river before an industrial dam. So any critical value that may have come through challenging intrinsic notions of nature came instead from its introduction.

Raviv Ganchrow (1972) is an Amsterdam based artist and sound researcher. His work examines interdependencies between sounding and context, addressing thresholds in contemporary hearing in terms of their operational constraints. These aspects are explored through (sound) installations, writing, and the development of pressure-forming and vibration-sensing technologies. His approach to audibility is that of a site whereby attention, surrounding, and subjectivity are mutually conductive. This approach that has been tested in-situ commissions such as Crescents (Tuned City, Tallinn, EE), Fray (Kontraste-Festival, Wachau, AT) and Long-Wave Synthesis (Sonic Acts / Dark Ecology, Kirkenes, NO). His long-term Listening Subjects project seeks the role of quotidian (urban) environments in preparing sonic attention. Recent installations, such as Reykjavik Circuit (UNM, Reykjavik, IS) and Agora Circuit (forthcoming, Tuned City, Messene, GR), establish live context-sounding circuits – patched through the locale – that explore spatial-material agency in ambient vibrations. Ganchrow completed his architectural studies at the Cooper Union, New York, and sonic studies at the Institute of Sonology, University of the Arts, The Hague where he is currently a faculty member.

Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute of Experimental Arts (NIEA), University of New South Wales, Sydney. Historian and theorist of the media arts and experimental music with concentrations in the study of sound, electromagnetism, and natural media. Author of Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013) and Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999). Editor with Hannah Higgins of Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts(University of California Press, 2012); with Larry Austin of Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973 (University of California Press, 2011), and with Gregory Whitehead of Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde(MIT Press, 1992). He is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital and Warhol Foundation, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Jonathan Reus is an American musician, researcher and curator whose work blends machine aesthetics with free improvisation. His broader research is into instruments and instrumentations, and their potential to bring new insight into knowing the world. Jonathan is associate lecturer of Computing and Coded Culture at the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media in Leuphana University, Lüneburg, where he has created teaching methods for hybrid coursework blending science, mathematics and cultural studies. He is also a lecturer in performative sound art at the ArtEZ academy of art in Arnhem.

Flora Reznik is an Argentinian artist based in The Netherlands. She studied in Universidad del Cine (FUC), obtained a diploma in Philosophy (University of Buenos Aires), while she worked as a video editor in film and TV, and co-funded the contemporary arts magazine “CIA”. In The Netherlands she graduated from the ArtScience Interfaculty department, in The Royal Academy of Art, and currently co-curates the artist initiative Platform for Thought in Motion, while she develops her work as an artist in the fields of video, performance, installation and text.

Sissel Marie Tonn is a Danish artist living in The Hague. She works with multi-media installation, textiles and writing, and her processual approach is driven by a great deal of curiosity and the possibilities of building relationships across fields. Her work revolves around an interest in structures of attention and perception within ecologies undergoing subtle or profound changes. Within this discourse her work explores these environmental (often humanly induced) changes, extending the public debates towards epistemological issues connecting these events to the body and its sensing of presence. She completed a master in Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2015 and will be a resident at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht in 2017.

From the organizers of the Reading Room: Thank you again to Raviv Ganchrow and Douglas Kahn for their insights in The Reading Room and in joining our community. We hope to welcome you both back in Den Haag. And special thanks to all the participants that joined in this gathering.