Addressing otherness in and through sound arts to establish intimacy and proximity as a form of co-creativity and as critical terms for discourse production

This research offers an alternative approach to the critical understanding of sound arts, equipping makers and theorists to account for intimacy and proximity as fundamental elements at work within sound arts, both experientially and as part of meaning-making. The suggestion is that intimacy and proximity enable the co-creativity of performer and audience, which enables the inclusion of otherness and alterity. To articulate this suggestion this research situates sound art works as performative, and specifically as ‘liminally performative’: as generative intra-active and co-creative temporal and physical spaces (Susan Broadhurst 1999).

Through the critical consideration of my creative writing practice and my sound art creative practice, discussed through Luce Irigaray’s ‘caress’, Susan Broadhurst’s ‘agential liminality’ and Karen Barad’s ‘diffraction’ and ‘intra-action, this research develops as its central finding the notion of the “Other’s-Other”: a thought-device by which one can appraise oneself as an other in the relationship as a co-creative protagonist. It is this thought device that introduces intimacy and proximity as critical terms into discourse and subsequently allows me to articulate from those terms the performative elements of sound art works, which enable the moment of co-creativity and thereby importantly bring otherness into direct consideration. I ask, what otherness is being experienced and how; and how that otherness acts as a cocreative force in the fruition of the work.

Writing critically about my own creative practice motivated a study of binary otherness in phenomenological and existential philosophy as a first theoretical working ground. From there, and in critique of the binary definition, the otherness that comes to the fore in this thesis is a ‘non-binary otherness’, an otherness not caught in fixed oppositions, but which is plural and shifting, producing an alternative way of thinking about subjectivity, participation in relation to sound art works. By making and speaking about sound art works as performative, I move away from the distancing otherness of voyeurism in Sartre’s The Look (1943) towards the intimacy of Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of the caress (2001). Thus the Other’s-Other is formulated from roots in my classical musicianship practice through Irigaray while also integrating Karen Barad’s entanglement and diffraction (2007), and Donna Haraway’s responseability (2016). I also use performance theorist Susan Broadhurst’s liminal performativity and reference to scenographic practices to clarify intimacy and proximity in my own practice and spatialized installations, borrowing Broadhurst and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s descriptive terms to consolidate my development of the Other’s-Other through key artistic auto-ethnographic accounts.