SOUND ART / STREET LIFE: TRACING THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL EFFECTS OF SOUND INSTALLATIONS IN LONDON
Christabel Stirling

Stirling, C. (2016) 'Sound Art / Street Life: Tracing the social and political effects of sound installations in London', Journal of Sonic Studies 11.

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London (2013-15) to address the social and political effects of installation and place-based sound-works. I begin by reviewing a number of theoretical approaches to the city, using my own and others’ ethnographic accounts of London to problematize some of the affirmative conceptualizations of the city being propagated by non-representational theories and cultural geographers. In so doing, I provide the theoretical and contextual substratum for my ensuing discussion of the sound-works, and offer an initial view on why physical urban public space remains crucial to progressive politics. I then examine the sonic re-arrangement of public space in three site-specific sound installations. Through ethnographic analysis of the social dynamics summoned into being by each sound-work, and the “multiple mediations” that animated such dynamics (Born 2005), I offer interpretations as to whether, and if so how, the sound installations might be enlisted as part of a process oriented towards mobilizing democratic designs.