Situating Cinesonics

Presently, ideas of what cinema is are changing. Movies are no longer exclusively produced for theaters, but also for galleries, museums, concert venues and clubs. Audiences are not necessarily watching and listening to them in silence, on a large screen and in a dark room, but can run them anytime, anywhere on handheld devices. Many artists and theorists working with film stress that the medium can no longer be thought as purely visual, but as also perceived through other senses, like that of hearing, smell and/or touch. These shifts suggest that the concept of the cinematic the idea which reception sitatutions, media, objects and artworks can evoke an impression of cinema are multiple and heterogeneous, and much less tied to the singular technological, formal or institutional setup that film theories have often argued for. Situating Cinesonics explores some of these new and different ideas of the cinematic by focusing on what I call cinesonic performances: audiovisual art acts that rely on the live performance of sound to generate a cinematic experience. The project asks how these acts which often do not `look like` cinema at the first glance nevertheless create a `cinematic feel.` Since I am interested in describing sound as a material phenomenon, I will track this `feel` via the different bodies involved in performing and witnessing audiovisual art acts: the bodies of performers on and off screen, the bodies of audiences, the bodies of instruments, playback and recording devices, the bodies of technologies of production, exhibition and dissemination, and the bodies of the spaces that hold the cinesonic acts I research. This focus responds to recent developments in the arts, where a growing number of works explore cinema as a medium of (live) sound, be it via collaborations of visual artists and musicians, by staging cinematic narratives without images and by music only, or by playing with invisible cinematic narrative devices like the voiceover. Many of the practices I dicuss, like the DJ performances of Camilla Sørensen and Greta Christensen, or Grada Kilombas multimedia performance Illusions (2018), put an emphasis on the entanglement of technical setups and human bodies. Thus, they bring up questions that present-day film studies have not yet sufficiently addressed: which components of a work, performance, screening situation does the materiality of film sound generate from, and what theoretical language can be used to describe it? How can components like the volume or ADSR envelope of a specific sound event tell the story of a film? How do cinematic sounds impact upon audiences differently when moving from one context to the other for instance, from the movie theater to the museum, from the archive to the club, from projection in a gallery to file on a streaming platform? And how do different audiences make different sense and different experiences from the same artworks, the same sounds? 1

How does sound as a material phenomenon make meaning in an essay film? How do the non-representational qualities of film and video sound - its affective and auditive textures, rhythms and dynamics - interact with film and video images that do represent? How can media theory criticism address film and video sound in its materiality, in dialogue with artistic film and video works that explicitly inquire into the politics of representation? Situating Cinesonics tested how methods from contemporary sound art studies could be employed for theorizing sound-image relationships in essay films and video works from the 1980s and 2010s that remediate archival material from a minoritarian, power-critical point of view (and, as the project hopes to delineate, of audition). Sound art studies methods, so one of the project's leading hypotheses, provide an experimental vocabulary for describing the sensory textures, affordances and intensities of sound that media theoretical methods lack. Integrating sound art studies methodology in the study of film and video allows media critics to better understand how the auditory, sonic, material qualities of film and video sound move and speak to audiences. On the other hand, sound art studies methods pose an explicit challenge for addressing the audiovisual relationships that are central for the artworks discussed in the project: they are wary of the visual, and of thinking the sonic in terms of representation. Sound art studies often resort to an ontological split that Jonathan Sterne (2012) calls "the audiovisual litany:" they frame sound/hearing as immersive, affective, subjective, vibrant, and relational, and vision/looking as a distancing, intellectual, objective sense that privileges separation. Following the logic of this split can make questions that loom large in media theoretical discussions of archival audiovisuals (like: how do archival materials impose epistemological classifications and hierarchizations on those represented in it?) make appear purely visual, and thus irrelevant for their ends. Instead, sound art studies methods urge critics to ask how audiences can potentially make new (and potentially more just or emancipatory) meanings when engaging with an artwork's sonic materiality directly, via listening and sonic thinking. In three in-depth case studies, Situating Cinesonics shows how sound art studies methodologies can be used without succumbing to the logics of "the audiovisual litany." Discussing selected works by Cana Bilir-Meier, Black Audio Film Collective and Elizabeth Price, the project argues that when sound and image interact and relate, meaning flows between them, and that these flows very productively lend themselves to critical address with sound art studies methodology. At the same time, the project demonstrates how questions of representation resonate in even the most free-flowing of sonic and audiovisual relationships, and gives practice examples of how to integrate them in one's own sound-centered media theoretical inquiry.