Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (review)

In a world that privileges visual imagery over auditory stimuli, the act of seeing over the act of hearing, very few authors are able to identify the significance of sound, both accidental and purposeful, as that which surrounds us completely in our day-today lives. Sounding New Media by Frances Dyson is an informative book on the still-developing role between new media, consumer, and creator by examining the elusive nature of sound and its lack of attention in new media as a primary component for immersion and embodiment in art and technology. The book proceeds chronologically by covering historical outcroppings of technology that unite with performance, sound, and art of the twenty-first century. These advancements in technology, such as the telephone, radio, broadcasting, tape player, microphone, and Internet, are the historical underpinnings of electronic media to which Dyson references, in function and in metaphor, similar developments in philosophical thought suggested by Arthur Schopenhauer, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze.

Of particular interest is the author's use of the term "immersion," by which she means those principles in technology that, often by proximity, allow the body to become enveloped in the experience of electronic media, as well as the saturation via "immersion" by and in technology which is typical of daily life in the twenty-first century. Dyson's purpose is to examine the "distance that technological mediation imposes —between the user and the apparatus, the real and the simulated, the natural and the artificial, the human and the technological" (p. 7). She compares the role of sound in past artistic experimentation to new electronic works since "the 'new' of new media depends on redefining embodiment, space, reality, and experience in ways remarkably similar to notions of immersion and transcendence associated with audiophony" (p. 182).

Dyson also focuses on the symbiosis between the human body and interactive electronic media, ranging from the radio to the Internet, that involve or require the body in order to function correctly. She draws a correlation between certain aspects of the body, such as breath, breathing, hearing, voice, soul, mind, death, dying, and decay, with philosophical theories ranging from Heidegger's Dasein, Barthes' "grain of the voice," Davies's "flux," to the Christian belief of the Virgin Mary's conception through the ear. She examines how the body is used in technology and what the future potentially holds for artists who choose to include the body with media. Sound, she insists, affects the whole body as a vibration, pulse, or signal and is felt, not just heard. Because of the fact that we have a hearing range of 360 degrees versus a sight range of 180 degrees, and because we have the ability to shut our eyes but not shut our ears (p. 4), sound occurs as an "event rather than an object" (p. 10). As a result, our "ocularcentric" society prioritizes sight and action over sound and sensation.

The focus of the author's work lies in her analysis of several key artists and musicians who have directly affected the development of new media such as John Cage, Edgard Varèse, Antonin Artaud, Jon McCormack, Catherine Richards, and Char Davies. She credits the collaborations between Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Tudor in forming the Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc. (E.A.T.), and links Cage's liberation of traditional music production through his silence-as-sound idea in 4'33" and 0'00" (4'33" no. 2) with Artaud and Varèse's collaborative but unfinished project L'astronome as the initial steps toward the total immersion of art and music. The culmination of this progression is completed through Davies's interactive media entitled Osmose and Ephémère, which allows the participant to dictate their movement in a virtual reality scenario by adjusting their own breath and balance. Dyson provides numerous examples and vivid...