Rotting Sounds

Most of todays media output, be it audio or video, is produced and stored in the digital domain. Although digital data are adorned by the myth of lossless transmission and migration, everyday experience does prove the existence of degradation and, ultimately, data loss in various forms. This pertains to the physical nature of storage media and playback devices as well as to media formats and software in the context of their technological infrastructure. The project strives to elaborate on the causes, mechanisms and effects of such deterioration, specifically in the context of digital audio. Since degradation cannot be avoided on principle, it is our general aim to unearth latent degrees of freedom pertaining to the artistic practice in the omnipresence of decay. How can degradation effects be understood, actuated, reproduced, directed and harnessed within sound art? Which are the mechanisms and implications of obsolescence concerning hard- and software? How can we model the process of decay in the digital domain, and what are its products and residues? What is the impact of the environment and human interaction? To which extent are artworks products of their material sources or their symptoms of decay? To set up the project, we will conduct formal research on the fundaments and mechanisms of data degradation, and we will also organize five topical workshops in order to generate novel ideas and concepts. We will develop a low- level digital audio toolkit on which we will base our experiments on deterioration, potentially in all conceivable forms, pertaining to technical components such as data carriers, electronic circuits, algorithm logic and language, as well as to aesthetics and meaning in the form of musical content. A selection of experimental prototypes will be produced as artworks, and exposed to the public in the form of performances and exhibitions over long durations and/or in demanding environments. Written publications and a symposium will reflect on the concepts, results and repercussions of the project. We envision our endeavor to function as a lighthouse project, deepening the awareness of largely unexplored properties of digital sound as a major component of contemporary art and prevalent technology. We hope to raise the conscience regarding the materiality, fragility and socio-economic contextuality of digital data in general by discussing and disseminating these topics in the broader artistic and scientific public. Our approach is basically inverse to a typical technological or scientific methods: Instead of researching means to overcome a commonly understood defect, we propose to recognize and integrate this defect, so that its potential damage is transferred into a benefit.

The majority of today's media is produced in the digital domain. Although digital data are adorned by a myth of perfection, everyday experience does provide evidence for the existence of degradation and, ultimately, data loss in various forms. The multi-year artistic research project Rotting Sounds has investigated the causes, mechanisms and effects of such deterioration, specifically in the context of digital audio. Cooperation partners were the mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The respective departments involved are Composition, Electroacoustics and Tonmeister Education (mdw, represented by Thomas Grill), Art & Science (Applied Arts, Till Bovermann) and Conservation and Restauration (Academy, Almut Schilling). Within the framework of the project, artistic works such as compositions, sound installations, performances, sculptures, etc., were created as experimental setups to identify specific conceptual and aesthetic characteristics of degradation processes and thus-through thorough introspection-generate new knowledge in the field of experimental music and beyond. One of the main topics that we studied in detail pertains to the nature of long-term sound installations as experimental systems. It turned out that a "closedness" of a system in a thermodynamical sense is challenged by the principles of recurrence we have used, exponentially amplifying "leaks" or other imperfections. This has also triggered questions of maintainance practice of degrading artworks and regarding forms of appropriate "ecological" thinking. A major conceptual as well as practical topic was the interface between the digital and analog domains, with "1-bit audio" technology situated right on the border. We developed software and hardware to realize installations and performance concepts to address the specific aesthetics of this transitional realm. Inter-domain encoding and decoding was also a more general theme with diverse experiments charting the varied terrain and respective effects of degradation. One result was the composition for ensemble "rill", premiered at Wien Modern festival. Extrapolating such effects over long time spans brought us to the metaphor of "deep time" with a focus on media materiality and questions pertaining to sociocultural aspects of encoded information. We developed three interdisplinary work series ("Voicings of an auralist", "Auditorium of Rotting Sounds Archive", "Fragments"), each implementing multiple artistic perspectives. Our scholarly publications we started with a manifesto, worked on technical aspects, presented the figure of the "Auralist" for a book chapter and a radio play, injected fragments into the Research Catalogue, described our experimental approaches to the field, and introduced the notion of "digital patina" to characterize observed aesthetics in permanent transformation we observed and to open up a new perspective on the existence of the digital in a material context.