Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde

by Douglas Kahn (Editor)

Wireless Imagination addresses perhaps the most conspicuous silence in contemporary theory and art criticism, the silence that surrounds the polyphonous histories of audio art. Composed of both original essays and several newly translated documents, this book provides a close audition to some of the most telling and soundful moments in the "deaf century," conceived and performed by such artists as Raymond Roussel, Antonin Artaud, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, John Cage, Hugo Ball, Kurt Weill, and William Burroughs. From the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, the essays uncover the fantastic acoustic scenarios projected through the writings of Raymond Roussel; the aural objects of Marcel Duchamp; Dziga Vertov's proposal for a phonographic "laboratory of hearing"; the ZAUM language and Radio Sorcery conjured by Velimir Khlebnikov; the iconoclastic castaways of F. T. Marinetti's La Radia; the destroyed musics of the Surrealists; the noise bands of Russolo, Foregger, Varèse, and Cage; the contorted radio talk show delivered by Antonin Artaud; the labyrinthine inner journeys invoked by German Hörspiel; and the razor contamination and cut-up ventriloquism of William S. Burroughs.

Genres: History, Music, Art

466 pages, Paperback

First published July 25, 1994

About the author

Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute for Experimental Arts at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is author or editor of several books, including Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (1999) and, most recently, Source: Music of the Avant-Garde (2011) and Mainframe Experimentalism (2012).

Reviews

[Sophie]

A great compilation of essays documenting early experiments deconstructing sound, music. Edison attempts to resurrect the dead and Cocteau fights for attention during Dada musical productions. Also includes sound theories by Burroughs and Cage.

[Jsun]

great essays in this book. excellent academic essays on many aspects of sounds evolution in the arts over the years from many different voices.