Other planes of here: sound, multiplicity and the social

ABSTRACT This research looks at sound as a mode of knowledge transference. Sound here operates as a sensorial conduit for multiple senses of time and place and is seen as a carrier of past and future and as an amplifier of collective mythologies and complexities. This research takes the methodology of the soundsystem culture organised around the speaker stack and looks in particular at the philosophical writings on the cultural importance of sound within non-western cultural contexts as put forth by Louis Chude-Sokei and Julian Henriques. The speaker stack is an adaptable object that functions both inside and outside the institution, and performs simultaneously as an amplifier and translator within each context. My work Other Planes of Here consists of the placement and use of a custom built speaker stack within a cycle of unrelated and indeed culturally differentiated events around Melbourne. By conflating this existing understanding of sound culture within the context of the art world, the project activates a heterogeneous field of networks and disconnections. This investigation engages with discourses around ethics and aesthetics within the field of participatory art and with the voice of ambivalence within the institution. It employs types of slippage as a tactic and as such it works within the theoretical and the philosophical realm, as well as the autobiographical, from the perspective of a migrant woman artist. Feminism is acknowledged within the framework of this project, as is the engagement with postcolonial theory via Gayatari Spivak and beyond through Denise Ferreira da Silva.