Quiet Time (2024)
https://www.are.na/editorial/quiet-time
Along the river at Lubljiana’s Museum of Architecture and Design, I gave a talk on background music and the web. This talk was curated by Kristoffer Tjalve as part of the Naive Yearly conference, featuring other talks by Nathalie Lawhead, Kim Kleinert, Agnes Cameron, Daniel Murray, Charmaine Li, Koloyan Kolev, and Tiger Dingsun.
An essay, titled Quiet Time, based on the talk has been published by Are.na Editorial. It surveys the industrial history of background music and raises questions about ambient music as a commodity within the logics of streaming platforms. It also makes the case for a more humanistic framing of the our experiences of background media through the examination of phenomenology and our disparate modes of attention (focused vs environmental).
I concluded my talk with a “group listening performance” titled River Song. Audience members were directed to a webpage that randomly assigned each of their phones a single note to play from a larger harmonic chord structure. These notes slowly diminished in volume until reaching silence while audience members roamed along the Ljubljanica River.
I intended this improvised choreography of shifting sound and bodies to produce a kind of sonic sculpture that slowly brought the environment into awareness. To “frame noise, present it, articulate the way its sounding reveals also an intimate structure, a micro-surface of folds, and the continuation of these folds into our bodies,” as the writer Lisa Robertson puts it.
