Joonas Siren

Poetics of Sound

How can sound form meanings in a contemporary art context?

My plan for doctoral thesis is to research how sound constructs meanings in contemporary art practice. Sound is in its very nature an ephemeral phenomenon, thus it works in a different realm than the visual arts.

The viewpoint will center around the question how sound constructs meanings outside of its own phenomenological nature? Many classical sound art works investigates the sound itself, how sound reacts in a specific location, how it's possible to manipulate sound, how one perceives the spatiality of a space through sound and so on. I find this a very formal aspect of sound and my research would focus on the opposite. I will be following on the lines of sound artist and sound art theoretician Seth Kim-Cohen, who opened up the theory to more critical approach and deconstructivism in his book "In the Blink of an Ear. Toward a Non-cochlear Sonic Art".

My interest lies in the recent developments in sound art in the last 20 years. Sound art has been slowly gaining more prominence in the art world, but its theory is still largely undeveloped.

The research is integral to my own artistic practice. I have been making electronic sounds almost 20 years, and during my MFA studies in the Finnish Fine Art Academy I started to work with sound installations. In the recent years I have increasingly felt that I need to make a strict separation between my music and my sound art work. The way to do that is to work with different kind of contexts and meanings with installation based sound than music.

The aural arts have been continuously lacking behind the developments of visual art. My research would try to open up ears, to grasp the possibilities of sound.

Finnish