Sound Art as Public Art

This keynote presentation explores ideas of a Sonic Public, proposing that sounds invisible mobility makes accessible, thinkabe and sensable, different and pluralized notions of publicness. The ephemeral and passing nature of sound, its unreliable and uncontrollable spirit, does not deform itself into the functional architecture of place and civic purpose but proposes formless and invisible alternatives. It creates the public as sonic possible worlds, plural and colliding, performing the city in a playful antagonism of private sonic life-worlds, that meet in passing, at moments of coincidence, to create not one appreciable entirety but fragmented possibilities. The sonic city is a possible timespace environment, whose actuality is not a matter of truth and untruth, but of sonic fictions: personal narrations that realize the invisible and conjure up the inaudible, rather than settle on what can be seen collectively.

Sound Art as Public Art does neither insert itself nor superimpose itself onto this timespace environment but participates in its production. Thus it makes apparent the frames, edges and boundaries of what is considered the actual place, and implodes the singularity of that perception. Its ethics lies at once within the profession of art: to produce a good work of art; as well as in a participatory production of place: to make us listen and see the invisible dynamic of the world in whose mobile depth the visibility of the city, its architectural, political and social actuality, is produced from sonic possibilities, whose audibility and inaudibility in turn are the parameters of what that city is and what it will become.

This invisible Public Art reminds us that public is not a visual concept, a permanent institution and infrastructure, but a participatory and transitory practice. It leads us back to the production rather than the perception of publicness and opens the monumental, permanent and fixed notion of civic place to the sonic possibility of civic performance, in whose openness we as listeners open ourselves to reach and access our own possibilities.

In collaboration with the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.