An interesting aspect of the concept of representation is that while the signifier must be something we can immediately grasp (after all it is the signifier which is “present”), this does not necessarily hold for the signified. So the act of representing is obviously a creative act, a translation in which the representamen gets a life of its own. When we say we create a representation of (global) climate, what does that mean? Nobody can have a phenomenological grasp on “the climate”, just as noone has an experience of being on the moon (except a very few lucky people). Things get messy immediately. When we say global climate, we think “globe”, and we probably see one of the standardised signifiers for globe, e.g. a world map, the animated map of the weather reports etc.
So when we propose that the installation is going to constitute a “micro climate”, that is an interesting collision. The micro obviously refers to the physical space of the exhibition, but also we borrow the term which usually means a climatic condition which is measured in a small space and which is distinguished from the surrounding climate. A singularity so to speak. The Wikipedia article on microclimate is quite interesting. For example:
Tall buildings create their own microclimate, both by overshadowing large areas and by channeling strong winds to ground level. Wind effects around tall buildings are assessed as part of a microclimate study.
This is of course the basic condition of ecology: systems are not independent but coupled, so each of my own motions or actions to some extent influences the climate.
Gernot Böhme is well known for his idea of using the notion of “atmosphere” as the core ingredient in designing aesthetic objects of any sorts (so let sound installation be one of them). The important aspects can be found in the essay “Atmosphere as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics” (1993; a German version titled “Atmosphäre als Grundbegriff einer neuen Ästhetik” from 1995 is available as well). I first encountered his work in the form of a German book “Atmosphäre: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik” (1995), a copy of which Robin Minard lent me in 2004. Although I read the book at the time, I only recently re-read the atmosphere essay.
The idea of atmosphere as something “enveloping”, but also something that can be changed and conditioned, naturally resonates with the school of sound ecology, so it is no surprise that it has been received in that context. But even if one does not fully subscribe to that discourse, there are quite a few interesting elements in his thought.
Using ecology, Böhme tries to find a perspective on aesthetics which differs from Kant (a “judgmental” instead of “experience” based view), or Adorno or Lyotard (even though he also works with the idea of Umwelt). Somewhat rooted in phenomenology, Böhme is also critical of a logocentric dominance, semiotics and communication. As I was working a lot with Derrida’s texts in my thesis—who is a major opponent of “logocentrism”—this is where I came about the following quote which I think people should read as a reminder:
It is not, however, self-evident that an artist intends to communicate something to a possible recipient or observer. Neither is it self-evident that a work of art is a sign, insofar as a sign always refers to something other than itself, that is, its meaning.
Böhm then goes on to focus on the material quality of atmospheres, arguing that Walter Benjamin introduced the turn towards an aestheticisation of life. In my special reading of his texts, I feel reminded of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s objection that “episteme” is primarily materially grounded, whereas the linguistic function is a secondary one. Böhme picks up Benjamin’s notion of aura—which I am not entirely sure we should be keeping, but…—implying a certain passivity, but more importantly that aura is absorbed bodily.
The crucial point about atmospheres is their “origin”. According to Böhme they are hybrid things that are constituted as much by “subjects” as by the inherent quality of “objects”, if we must use these terms. Instead of purely grounding them on inner feelings, they must emerge from a “bodily awareness” inside a space or environment. With all the abundant systems theoretical terminology (in almost any discourse), to think of that which is between “system” and “environment” is a very helpful exercise. I am not entirely sure in which respect Böhme tries to distinguish himself from Lyotard, and I have not read much of Lyotard, but I really love this bit from “Oikos” (1988):
My oikeion is an otherness that is not an Umwelt at all, but this otherness in the core of the apparatus. We have to imagine an apparatus inhabited by a sort of guest, not a ghost, but an ignored guest who produces some trouble, and people look to the outside in order to find out the external cause of the trouble. But probably the cause is not outside, that is my idea. […] I have connected, and I will connect this topic of the oikeion with writing that is not a knowledge at all and that has, properly speaking, no function. Afterward, yes, when the work is written, you can put this work into an existing function, for example, a cultural function. Works are doomed to that, but while we are writing, we have no idea about the function, if we are serious.
I don’t think it is far-fetched to see quite a similarity between Lyotard’s “guest” and the production of atmospheres.
There are multiple formulations of the paradox of being at the same time inside and outside. Böhme speaks of the non-closure of an object which permits it to “radiate” qualities, but ultimately he ends with the dry statement that an atmosphere is a “common reality between perceiver and perceived”. The inside-is-the-outside, on the other hand, is something that can be found again in the thought of Derrida who seems to pick it up—like Rheinberger—from Lacan’s concept of an “extimacy”. Something is intimate, but it is dislocated and found outside. In Rheinberger’s texts it describes our relation to the (research) apparatus: Because we are completely familiar with an apparatus (perhaps a form of embodiment), that apparatus can play out its own capacities—they are, so to speak, “unblocked”—and thereby becomes independent of the researcher.
As creators of a sound installation, are we merely designers of atmospheres? The aura notion—the privacy and passivity of the recipient—appears to be a particular mismatch when we consider the idea of interaction with the installation. It also appears anachronistic to go back before the conceptualisation of art. On the other hand, what I am interested in is to define a form which does not submit itself to a “non-cochlear sound”, another anachronism which ignores all the efforts against “metaphysics” conducted in the last thirty years.
I don’t know how exactly I came to think of sonification as an extended form of “musique concrete”, but the idea that we have to construct translation machines of given (arti)facts appears to be a possible way out of this dualism or impasse of phenomenology–conceptualisation.