College Art Association 110th Annual Conference 2022, Chicago
Panel co-organised by SONCITIES researcher Dr Ruth Bernatek with Dr Sophie Read (UCL), examining historical performances, situated sonic practices and events, which were conceived, designed, executed and experienced as spatial works that unfolded in time.
Tracing the performative or audiovisual residues of past events poses challenges to those who study in the present ephemeral architectural objects/practices which were once ‘live’. For example, whilst live sound, lighting, staging, voiced elements can be performed at an architectural scale, knowledge about them is often not generated from spatial plans, but from written manuscripts, inventories, program-scores, or using tools that, in themselves, provide limited information about the spatial effects they produced. This compels alternative frameworks for historical interpretation that account for their performative and spatial situatedness.
Each of our panel contributors work at different intersections of architecture, music, sound, performance, theatre, and their history, theory and design. Together, we will engage with different approaches to performance, event, time and spatiality, as well as practice-led modes of spatial and historical research. Tackling practical questions of retrieving and reconstructing spatial evidence; how researchers approach the real-time qualities of performance and their own working methods, but also the physical building, landscape or space in which that event took place and the occupation of space by performers and users/audience.
Speakers and papers titles:
If Walls Could Talk: On the Building as Phonograph, Joseph Clarke, University of Toronto
Documenting Disappearance: Radical Architecture, Performance and Acts of Refusal, Ross K Elfline, Carleton College
Sonic-Speculation: Aesthetic and Counter-Surveillance, Saeedeh Asadipour
Hedge School 2021, Tom Keeley, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
This panel is sponsored by The Society of Architectural Historians, and is presented as part of the 110th annual CAA all-virtual conference program 2022, Chicago.