Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts

Editorial: v13 n1

2021-04-30T15:46:16+00:00

Welcome to the new edition of the Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts. In this new number, our first from our 13th year, fosters our editorial view of the journal: a thematic dossier – around sound art – that deepens the research on our focus-areas and CITAR’s Strategic Plan (2020-2023), as well as works on complimentary sections: the Audiovisual Essays and the Reviews (books, in this issue). JSTA maintains its devotion to research in the fields of artistic research, finding new paths and new ways of researching art. It follows also the strategic guidelines for indexation and metadata support.

Audible (Art): The invisible connections

2021-04-30T15:46:25+00:00

This is an introduction to a special edition of JSTA dedicated to the myriad forms of sonic connections and audible expressions. We approach three dimensions of sound in an artistic context: auditory specificities, performance dimensions, and computational listening. Sound is a complex phenomenon present in everyday life and dwelling between conscious and unconscious processes. A universe contained within itself, where every sound event has the potential to be considered aesthetic material, contributing to the proliferation of creative approaches. These specific conditions have potentiated an outbreak of sonic art genres and expressions. Listening as an epistemic process has been subjected to successive changes pushed by computation and the breeding of computational media. This essay points to visions and approaches to sound as a specific field of knowledge that can arise from, lead to, or be used as a tool of world-building.

Music Derived from Other Sources

2021-04-30T15:46:42+00:00

One imagines composed music as originating in the mind of an author. Indeed, I have for the last six decades been composing music in this fashion. However, for the last five decades I have also been repeatedly attracted to various methods of deriving music from sources both inside and outside of music, viz. linguistic, acoustic, visual and mathematical as well as other works of music. For most of these operations I have resorted to strict algorithmic means and the use of computer programming. For instance the linguistic: I have used text orthography, spectral analyses of human speech, digital recordings of the human voice, and synthetic semantic structures. This paper is the most comprehensive text on my work in this field.

'DIS_turbation': An Artistic Approach to Foster Nature-Connectedness

2021-04-30T15:46:45+00:00

This paper presents practice-based research on ecoacoustics, ocean soundscapes and anthropogenic noise. It explores creative strategies to the introduction, experience and performance of ocean soundscapes in artistic creation. As ocean soundscapes are increasingly a topic of concern globally, they become a crucial tool to foster an emotional affinity between people and natural environments. This research questions how to convey the experience of oceanic soundscapes and their human disruption. The paper details an artistic artefact - DIS_turbation - and its integrative approach, by exploring the vibrational and particle-motion component of ocean sound. The methods include place attachment, creative development, nature-connectedness and ecology of Æffect. The novelty lies in addressing biological processes as a creative resource to intervene in underwater noise dialogue, reveal hidden qualities of vibroacoustic ecology, develop artistic artefacts to translate particle-motion in a more grasping way, and foster inclusion with nature.

Julião Sarmento: The Innuendo of the Real

2021-04-30T15:46:29+00:00

Julião Sarmento’s body of work crosses artistic disciplines and fields. The artist resorts to film and video as a means to reach the artistic expression of an idea, open to an infinitude of interpretations. This audiovisual essay looks at the way Julião Sarmento works with moving images, focusing in three main perspectives: the word, the (feminine) body and rhythm. We conclude that each one of Sarmento’s works builds a system of codes, of communication, that opens new understandings of the human relation with the ‘real’.

Julião Sarmento’s Moving Images: Vision’s Perversity For The Maintenance of Desire

2021-04-30T15:46:18+00:00

This article analyses an audiovisual essay created around the exhibition Julião Sarmento. Film Works, that took place in Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Porto in 2019. This exhibition reunited 10 works in film and video produced by the Portuguese artist in different moments of his career. Following the audiovisual essay’s structure, I will approach three thematic obsessions transversal to Julião Sarmento’s work, as a reflexive proposal about a gaze phenomenology (or a vision’s perversity), regarding dispositives that involve the moving image. Particularly, in what concerns the problematic of desire. These are: (1) The constant work of language (the real, the symbolic and the imaginary); (2) The fragmented body (the conscience/disassembling of voyeurism); (3) The rhythm (exposing the matter of time in favor of a deceptive aesthetics).

Roy Andersson: The Essence of the Complex Image

2021-04-30T15:46:31+00:00

The work of Roy Andersson, a Swedish auteur that turned its back to Realism and embraced Abstractionism, embodies one of the few truly defying and groundbreaking attitudes in modern Cinema: the denial of speed. The current essay focus on the methods through which he obtains this effect and the contribution of his body of work to the Aesthetics of Cinema.

Propelling Cinema and Aesthetics Forwards Through (Un)Reality: Pedro Afonso’s Take On Roy Andersson’s Complex Image

2021-04-30T15:46:23+00:00

This short piece analyses Pedro Afonso’s video essay on Roy Andersson’s Complex Image, an aesthetic style based on the tableau shot. It proceeds by scrutinizing the relationship Andersson’s aesthetic maintains with painting, slow cinema and political ideology, three aspects connected with realism, one way or the other. By focusing on the operative word “complex”, instead of “image”, this text claims that the Complex Image is not strictly pictorial; that long shots do not necessarily equate with slow cinema; and that there is a strong political engagement alongside an undeniably creative form.

A Topography of Sound Art

2021-04-30T15:46:36+00:00

Austrian artist and director of ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, Peter Weibel (Odessa, 1944), curates a book/catalogue of the mythical exhibition Sound Art, Sound as Medium of Art, that took place between March 2012 and February 2013 in Karlsruhe, with nearly one thousand images of sound art pieces. Along with a very detailed historical trace of sound as a form of art, the book contains different texts and essays about sound and its history written by renowned and iconic figures in art all articulated in five main sections. A very important work for any artist or amateur interested in sound and music.

Perspectives on the Future for Sonic Writers

2021-04-30T15:46:39+00:00

This article intends to provide a holistic review of Thor Magnusson’s Sonic Writing, presenting the authors’ historically-informed views about sound and music technologies. It starts by addressing the distinctions between the three categories of music-related inscriptions, in material, symbolic and signal form. It then reflects upon the parallelism this categorization has with the scope and topics within different conferences from the field of sound and music technology. Furthermore, it recounts the contributions of recent deep learning approaches in musical development, expanding on the books’ notions and offering an updated view concerning the specific purpose of automated music generation. Moreover, a contrast between the recent wave of AI-related technological developments and older scientific advances is discussed. Finally, driven by considerations about computational creativity in the field of music stated on Sonic Writing, this review propels a reflection regarding the role of machines in artistic creation.

Learning by Listening with Plants

2021-04-30T15:46:33+00:00

This review of Monica Gagliano's book Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants presents the author's unconventional scientific approach to plant ecology as a human-plant collaborative endeavour. As Gagliano's personal encounters with plants supported by indigenous wisdom changed her way of doing science, the scientist learned to think out and away from the conventional box of scientific determinism and abstraction from the subjective experience. Gagliano's journey led to groundbreaking scientific discoveries in acoustic communication with plants, probing their consciousness and capacities to listen, learn and remember. This book is an important contribution not only to the field of plant bioacoustics but also to any kind of academic work, revealing that a transformative knowledge lies in collaborative ventures with nonhumans as conscious subjects in their own rights. Learning by listening with plants, a common practice in indigenous cultures, is certainly a way to engage an active dialogue with nonhuman intelligences, but we must be willing to open our minds and transcend the view of plants as objects of scientific materialism.