005_Reaction to Kenneth Goldsmith's "Bring Da Noise: A Brief Survey of Sound Art"

In the article, Goldsmith discusses some of the major contributions to Sound Art in the past century. He jumps around fast from Dada sound poems to Sonic Youth to Christina Marclay, trying to diversify his favorite artists and their use of sound as an artistic medium. I want to focus on my two artists he mentioned: Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting In A Room" and Lauren Lesko's "Thirst".

Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting In A Room" recognizes that interior architectural space forms and shapes the perception and reception of sound. In the piece, Lucier "utters a series of sentences describing exactly hat he is doing into a tape recorder in an empty room." After this, the sound is played back into the room and re-recorded over and over, until his language is abstracted past the point of recognizable English. This work is a good example of how 'sound art quietly absorbs technological breakthroughs into its practice, but rarely makes them their content." Often, in many "tech" art projects, a point of access into the work is code, instruments of tech, but here the tech is used as a tool, rather than a medium.

Lauren Lesko's "Thurst" is, what Goldsmith describes as, "edgy.. and an unusually beautiful soundscape." For this piece, Lesko uses her body as a machine to produce sound. She uses a contact microphone, inserts it into her vagina and walks around for 30 minutes. After listening to the work, it has a very physical and bodily feel, and I often felt physical reactions when listening with headphones. Body-driven sounds transfer physical responses and how the body becomes a personal instrument.