G. Douglas Barrett Livres

For his first US museum exhibition, Hong Kong-based sound artist Samson Young looks to the idealism presented at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago to explore varying concepts of social progress and utopia through a trilogy of animated music videos. The catalog addresses questions of how people adapt to societal changes that they have little control over. For Young, “progress” as it was defined in the 1933 fair’s subtitle “A Century of Progress” represents a specific variant of aspirational thinking. From cars to shopping malls and houses designed for the future to political change, progressive thinking has had contrasting consequences as it made its impact felt across the globe in the decades that followed.The accompanying catalog acts both as an introduction to Young’s work and a lavishly illustrated document of the exhibition. It features an essay by curator Orianna Cacchione contextualizing Young’s work, an essay by G. Douglas Barrett exploring the tension between modern visions of utopia and the musical version of the contemporary, and an interview between Seth Kim Cohen and Young about the form of the music video and its variations in the exhibitions. Additionally, the catalog also contains full-color video stills of the works, original drawings, and archival materials included in the exhibition.

After Sound considers contemporary art practices that reconceive music beyond the limitation of sound. This book is called After Sound because music and sound are, in Barrett's account, different entities. While musicology and sound art theory alike typically equate music with pure instrumental sound, or absolute music, Barrett posits music as an expanded field of artistic practice encompassing a range of different media and symbolic relationships. The works discussed in After Sound thus use performance, text scores, musical automata, video, social practice, and installation while they articulate a novel aesthetic space for a radically engaged musical practice. Coining the term "critical music," this book examines a diverse collection of art projects which intervene into specific political and philosophical conflicts by exploring music's unique historical forms. Through a series of intimate studies of artworks surveyed from the visual and performing arts of the past ten years-Pussy Riot, Ultra-red, Hong-Kai Wang, Peter Ablinger, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, and others-After Sound offers a significant revision to the way we think about music. The book as a whole offers a way out of one of the most vexing deadlocks of contemporary cultural criticism: the choice between a sound art effectively divorced from the formal-historical coordinates of musical practice and the hermetic music that dominates new music circles today.

An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human.In Experimenting the Human , G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements.Rather than pursuing the human's beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human.