1. PREAMBLE

This article has its origins back in 2013 when the festival Prepared Environments brought the German sound art pioneer Christina Kubisch to Moscow. Kubisch is primarily known for her work with electromagnetic induction – a process of translating electromagnetic waves into electric signals that can then be made audible through regular audio devices such as headphones or loudspeakers. Having made a number of installations based on this principle, in 2004 Kubisch started her long-term project Electrical Walks – a form of soundwalk augmented by induction technology. The participants in these walks are given inductive headphones, which allow listening to the electromagnetic waves emanating from various technologies – electric cables, ATMs, radio stations etc. Kubisch provides the participants with a map of interesting listening points in the city, where an Electrical Walk takes place, and a set of listening instructions, but the participants are not required to follow them and are free to explore the city however they like.Footnote ¹

In 2013, I was taking my first steps on the path to becoming a sound art researcher in Russia – a country not exactly known for having a thriving sound art scene. So, naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to experience one of the most iconic sound artworks first-hand, never mind that it took a 10-hour train ride to get to Moscow. Writing this five years later, I do not have a clear memory of the whole walk; however, four episodes stayed with me to this day as they induced a certain kind of critical discomfort in my then-self. Having grown up in the ruins of the Soviet Union with its approach to art as a vehicle for Marxist propaganda, at that point in my life I was squarely in the ‘art of art’s sake’ camp. Extremely sceptical of any kind of political agenda in art, I believed it cheapened the aesthetic experience, requiring it to be straightforward and uncomplicated. Yet the discomfort that Electrical Walks made me feel had clear political underpinnings – but in a way that did not feel didactic or condescending. The political message of the artwork was not spelled out in neon letters, the way activist art tends to do it, but emerged naturally from my experience of listening and participating. In this text, then, I will trace the participatory mechanisms of political meaning-making that are specific to participatory sound art through autoethnographic accounts of three sound artworks.

2. CHRISTINA KUBISCH: ELECTRICAL WALKS: MOSCOW (2013)

The first thing that springs to my mind when I think of the Moscow Electrical Walk is how it was underscored by the rich, often low, drones produced by various electric cables. These sounds followed me throughout most of the walk as background, substituting the natural soundscape. At one point, however, they became the focus of my listening. That site was a backyard of a fairly unremarkable house on Old Arbat street. At first glance, it was hard to understand what earned it a spot on the route map. The building’s only distinguishing feature was a network of numerous cables – supplying power, cable TV, phone and internet connections – sprawling along the walls and between them like a spider web. Its appearance was not something I would normally pay attention to – such sights are fairly common in older houses that were only electrified in the late twentieth century. However, in the electromagnetic spectrum, these cables became an orchestra of shimmering tones, engulfing me and drowning me in its rich harmonies. This awe-inducing sound sharpened the visual image of the place, underscoring the contrast between the old-fashioned, partly dilapidated housing and the technological demands of modern life.

One of the first listening objects mentioned in Kubisch’s map was a collection of anti-theft gates at a mall. The instructions here warned that the gate could produce extremely loud sounds, and advised turning down the volume on the headphones. The aggressive, ear-piercing beeping tones of the gates demarcating the borders between the departments were a stark contrast to the open plan of the mall with its lack of explicit walls. They shattered the appearance of openness revealing the suspicion and distrust that underscored the space and invisibly governed its structure. Adding to the disturbing atmosphere was the resemblance these sounds bore to the sirens of the police cars, provoking in me a fight-or-flight reaction. One can argue whether such unity of function and expression was a mere coincidence, but the role of the sonic in unsettling my experience was undeniable: it is making the anti-theft gates audible and the way they sounded that drove the political point home. I did not want to spend too much time with them: the visually neutral, even supposedly welcoming, space of the mall turned out to be invisibly very hostile.

This discomfort of being a presumed suspect appeared once more, in a different context, at another stage of my walk. I went through an underground pass to reach the offices of the Ministry of the Foreign Affairs. In the underpass, I was instructed to listen to the sounds produced by the GPS units of the cars driving above ground. It was a rather tricky task: the cars passed quickly and the GPS emissions only affected a narrow space around them. The sounds themselves, however, were beautiful and it put me into a playful mood, going back and forth through the underpass trying to predict where a car would go so as to stay with the sound for the longest possible time.

This playfulness was quickly gone when I reached the governmental building. So many years later, I cannot remember anything about the character of the sounds I heard there. I do, however, remember the discomfort about listening to the emissions coming out from the ministry offices. It felt like I was being a spy, or, even worse, that I could be suspected of being a spy.Footnote ² The bulky, unusual looking headphones did not help either. I passed by furtively, trying not to linger too much as I feared it could attract the attention of the security guards and ultimately land me an unpleasant encounter with the police.

The last section of the Moscow Walk was described in the instructions as ‘the ATM street’. It was a section of a street where several big banks had their offices and have put out their ATMs outside at a short distance from each other. The machines were all different models producing different variations of beeping tones. The sounds were rather weak and required me to put my head very close to the machine to hear them. This part of the route was uncomfortable not because of my own anxiety, but because I was aware of the anxiety my listening could induce in the people using the ATMs. With ATM fraud being widespread, it was easy to empathise with the fear of someone using an unusual technological device to listen to the banking operations. It made me think how the technologies can both empower us – for good or ill – and make us vulnerable. My listening to the ATMS could easily be misconstrued as listening in on the others’ financial secrets. This fear did not feel entirely unjustified as it was easy enough to imagine a device that would do exactly that. I did not linger long in this spot either, also because the sounds in question were not very interesting and arguably not worth the effort and the discomfort.

3. LETTING SOUNDS BE THEMSELVES

I recalled my experience of the Electrical Walks some years later reading Seth Kim-Cohen’s (Reference Kim-Cohen2009) book In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. Kim-Cohen argues for bringing sound art into the post-structuralist fold of the mainstream contemporary art discourse. The object of his critique is sound art’s alleged emphasis on the sensory and the material, which he attests is outdated, as the visual arts have long gone past the ‘retinal’ phase and are now preoccupied with the conceptual and the discursive (Kim-Cohen Reference Kim-Cohen2009: xv–xxiv).

Among the examples of ‘cochlear’ sound art, Kim-Cohen discusses Electrical Walks. His stance towards the artwork is extremely critical – and largely the opposite of the impression I had of it during my own encounter. To Kim-Cohen, Kubisch’s authorial withdrawal, her refusal to control what the participants listen to and how they interpret it, is a cop-out, as it constitutes an authorial gesture in itself. He then claims that Kubisch belongs to the ranks of ‘artists, performers, and composers, who try to get out of the way, to “let sounds be themselves”’ (ibid.:115). The aesthetic value of ‘the exposition and translation into sound of electromagnetic fields’ is questioned, as ‘[t]hese sounds, and the way they are presented, decline to engage the rich cultural, technical, social, ontological implications of their origins’ (ibid.: 115). Essentially, the problem with Electrical Walks for Kim-Cohen is that neither the work itself nor Kubisch’s statements and interviews produce a clear artistic stance towards the work’s social, cultural and political dimensions.

He notes, however, that ‘[we] are not obliged to engage one of Kubisch’s Electrical Walks as a backstage pass granting sonic access to the “real.” The walks send people (bodies) out into the city, highlighting the private/public nature of urban life’ (Kim-Cohen Reference Kim-Cohen2009: 119) Cumbersome headphones and atypical behaviour makes the participants stand out from the everyday street activities, being highly aware of their visibility prompting interest and attention from the passers-by. Thus, for Kim-Cohen ‘[the] crucial encounter is not with sound-in-itself, but with categories of experience and identity; with questions of the naturalness or normality of a class of activities; and with other selves engaged in their own categories, experiences, questions, and activities’ (ibid.: 119).

I cannot help but notice a contradiction in how Kim-Cohen approaches the sonic and the ‘non-cochlear’ readings of Electrical Walks. On the one hand, he confines the possibilities of engagement with the sound to what is explicitly stated in Kubisch’s texts – which are purposefully open as to not make the Walks too didactic (Cox and Kubisch Reference Cox and Kubisch2006). On the other hand, he contends the existence of ways of engaging with the artwork that are not artist-sanctioned, but somehow refuses to extend them to the work’s sonic aspects.

Analysing my own memory of Electrical Walks, it is clear to me how the sonic and the performative – and I would add to that the visual, as all the sounds heard during a walk have visible sources – are inextricably intertwined. The way the anti-theft gates or the power cables sounded played a significant role in the discomfort or awe I felt respectively when encountering their sources. Thus, even though they were not under Kubisch’s control, they were necessary for my making political sense of the work.

In the other two episodes I recounted – the ministry building and the ATM street – the performative aspect did take over the sonic. Yet the sonic still played a larger role in the process than what Kim-Cohen gives it credit for. It was precisely my silence that made my behaviour seem weird to the onlookers; had they had access to those sounds in my headphones, that would have explained it and affected their perceptions. Not necessarily for the better: while understanding that my hanging around the ATMs was only to listen to their magnetic emissions might have alleviated the fears of their users, it would have made me even more suspicious to the Foreign Office personnel.

4. POLITICS OF (DIS)ENGAGEMENT

It is worth noting how the meanings I drew from Electrical Walks and its sounds could only be inferred from my experience as a participant immersed in a particular, site-specific instalment of the project. Approached from an objective third-person position, the work’s politics remains hermetic and unknowable. In other words, Kim-Cohen’s criticism fully applies to a Platonic idea of Electrical Walks, yet the messy reality of participating and encountering, being curious and becoming unsettled, reveals a much richer landscape of meanings than a detached view could account for.

A detached position and distrust for lived experience, however, is demanded by the epistemological tradition of critique – or as Rita Felski redubs it after Ricoeur, hermeneutics of suspicion (Felski Reference Felski2015: 30–9) – to which Kim-Cohen’s book clearly belongs. In her book Limits of Critique, Felski takes a stance not against critique as a method per se, but against critique’s claim of being the method, the arts and humanities version of scientific rigour. Analysing the rhetoric and form of critical texts, she argues that ‘[c]ritical detachment … is not an absence of mood but one manifestation of it’, and as such it is riddled with its own idiosyncrasies and limitations (ibid.: 6). More specifically, the primary characteristics of critique, according to Felski, are:

When it comes to art and its politics, critique affords the researcher only two positions: either art itself performs a critique – ‘interrogate[s] the power relations instantiated by various players in its network of its presentation in reception’ (Kim-Cohen Reference Kim-Cohen2009: 115) – or it is complicit in the propagation of such power relations and should be critiqued on its own (Felski Reference Felski2015: 16). It is easy to see how the aforementioned four traits suffuse both Kim-Cohen’s argument and his expectations of what Electrical Walks should do. Felski argues, however, that ‘[w]e shortchange the significance of art by focusing on the “de” prefix (its power to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize) at the expense of the “re” prefix: its ability to recontextualize, reconfigure, or recharge perception’ (ibid.: 17, italics in the original). To emphasise the affective and the sensory, then, does not mean ‘to abandon politics for aesthetics’, but rather to acknowledge that neither art nor politics are reducible to the intellectual detachment and scepticism of critique (ibid.: 18). Much like Felski points out the fallacy of ‘the belief that the “social” aspects of literature … can be peeled away from its “purely literary” ones’ (ibid.: 11), my experience of Electrical Walks convinces me of the entanglement of the sonic and the political in sound art.

There is one more aspect to Electrical Walks that drives this point even further – their being participatory. Kim-Cohen interprets Kubisch’s authorial withdrawal – her neither exerting any artistic control over the sounds of the work and/or participants’ actions, nor imposing any specific interpretation onto the experience via an artist statement – largely as a lack of engagement with political issues. Indeed, as I have noted earlier, it would necessarily seem so if one were to approach Electrical Walks from a detached third-person perspective of critique. However, if we allow ourselves to go beyond suspicion, as Felski suggests, a necessary change in methodology and perspective becomes evident. As performance scholar Sruti Bala notes, ‘the unsolicited acts of participation’ – the participants actions that were not intended or even expected by the artist – are a necessary ‘other side’ of participatory art; and it is in these acts that the bulk of political meaning-making takes place (Bala Reference Bala2018: 90–3).

The question here is – provided the artwork only becomes complete in the act of participation and lacks any sort of fixity or explicitly stated authorial position – what is the object of our analysis? In The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Lydia Goehr warns against referring to sound installations and other experimental listening experiences as ‘works’ at all, as the concept itself implies a certain fixity of a museum artefact, noting that they might be better served by notions such as ‘musical occasions, sound environments, and musical situations’ instead (Goehr Reference Goehr1994: 244–5, 268–70). Similarly, Sanne Krogh Groth and Kristine Samson propose the notion of ‘sound art situations’ as a better designation for pieces ‘where contexts are entangled into the piece to such an extent that they are inseparable from what might be reckoned as the artwork’ (Groth and Samson Reference Groth and Samson2017: 109). It is by virtue of this entanglement that I cannot access a sound art situation from another perspective than that of a participant. It necessitates a pragmatist ‘radical empiricism’ (James Reference James1912), emphasising the incompleteness and insufficiency of my knowledge if I do not extend my analysis beyond the abstract and the invariant and onto the meanings and relations found in experience – my own and, even more importantly, the experiences of others as much as they can be observed or communicated to me. Ethnography, autoethnography and participant observation become the only tools I have to hold my analysis accountable to any sort of reality; otherwise I would be dealing primarily in speculations on imaginary constructs.

5. KAFFE MATTHEWS: ISPOD FONTANA (2019)

I am watching a video shot from a camera mounted on the front frame of a bike giving me a sort of first-person window into the cyclist’s view. A significant portion of my view is taken up by large yellow loudspeakers attached to the bike’s handlebars. The sounds emerging from these loudspeakers are chosen from a sample bank depending on the cyclist’s position as detected by a GPS unit – that is the idea behind all of Kaffe Matthews’s sonic bike rides – or bike operas, as she sometimes calls them. Matthews has been staging such participatory rides in various cities of the world since early 2010s. Some of them have the participants roam freely discovering the sounds on their own, others offer a set linear route to follow. The one in my video belongs to the latter kind. It is titled Ispod Fontana (‘under the fountain’) and happened in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, in April 2019.Footnote ³

I am watching this video as that is one of the precious few ways I can engage with this artwork. Being dyspraxic, I cannot bike and can never learn to. In fact, up until I went to Zagreb for my first in-person encounter with the sonic bikes, I had been under the impression that video documentation is the only form of this experience available to me. However, watching the employees of the Greta gallery, which managed the project, take the bikes out to the street gave me the idea of going for a walk with a sonic bike. I could not do the whole route, which circled through most of the city returning to the gallery at the end – it would take around 40 minutes biking, so at least three times as much walking. However, the map of the route showed a narrow point where I could easily cut through the circle, experiencing the first and the last parts of the route.

The impression I got from walking this abridged route differed significantly from what I see in the video. The footage shows the route as a continuous narrative centred around Matthews and her local collaborators, all of them women, discussing the current political situation in Croatia. They talk, most prominently, about how the tourism industry and the city’s attractions have become the primary focus of the policymakers to the detriment of the less trendy neighbourhoods. This narrative is underscored by the visuals of the route, taking the cyclist from the Empire style palaces of the city centre into the gritty brutalist quarters and back. The first-person perspective and the stereo-panned sound really drive the point back here, with the women in Matthews’s recording becoming my tour guides through the underside of Zagreb and its fountains. However, a musical structure emerges as the third voice in this intermedia polyphony, composed of musical improvisations of the participants and electronic tracks interspersed with field recordings, hinting also at a vibrant creativity that suffuses the city’s underside.

Conversely, the impression I got from my walk with the bike was very fragmented. The route and the sonic bikes were simply not designed for walking, even though in practice they afforded such usage. Each sound in the work was tied to a specific stretch of route and made to fit, give or take, the time it takes a cyclist to cover that stretch. As my walking speed could never match that of a bike, for me many of these sounds ended well before I reached the next stretch, creating long silences in the composition. However, more importantly, I also missed most of the discussion as it happened predominantly in the part of the route I had to skip. As a result, much of the political message of the work was lost on me. I start to make sense of some episodes only now, several months after, while watching the video.

On the other hand, the experience of this walk also had a certain first-person immersiveness to it that the video misses. A particularly memorable moment for me was the story of a homeless woman read by one of Matthews’s collaborators. The story took the form of a very mundane diary, plainly listing the activities the character performed day to day. Yet listening to it as I went past the sumptuous nineteenth-century palaces, their walls covered in tall columns and intricate sculptures, made the experience cathartic. Even though the character was obviously fictional, in the moment, she felt real to me, walking beside me and telling me her mundanely tragic story. Hearing it as I moved through the same streets that this character supposedly walked, noticing the contract between the grandeur of the architecture and the poverty of the inhabitants brought me into a state of heightened empathy that would not have been possible under a different setting, be it video or a gallery installation.

Which of the two versions of the work is ‘real’ then? Which should I trust to be a more faithful representation of the work’s politics? The video, being shot from a first-person perspective and covering the ride in its entirety, without any editing or processing, aims to give the viewer as close an experience of ‘being there’ as possible. Yet there is so much information it lacks: the immediacy of actually going through the cityscape, the physicality of riding a bike, the strained concentration of doing it in traffic, the awkwardness – or maybe excitement – of being the source of the sonic disturbance and the strangers’ reaction to it. On the other hand, my walk with the sonic bike was an incomplete and disjointed version of the work, yet it had moments of sharp, pointed meaning-making that the video fails to measure up to.

Moreover, many moments in the video only make sense to me because I also did the walk – and how many more are there that even the combination of the two sources does not represent? One such aspect can be easily pointed out: that of going through Ispod Fontana as a Zagreb local. Browsing the review book at the gallery, I noticed that many participants note how the ride changed their perception of the city and made them go into the areas they would not normally go. As a newcomer to Zagreb, I did not have a preconceived idea of the city, but I could relate the experiences I was reading about with how Electrical Walks affected my impression of Moscow. From my conversations with other participants, I also learnt that biking in Zagreb for them was per se a kind of political gesture, as the country lacked the biking culture that is widespread through other parts of Europe. Thus, for some of them, biking through the busy streets with sounds blasting from the bike’s loudspeakers felt like a form of protest, a demand for a more liveable and user-friendly city.

As a participatory sound art situation, Ispod Fontana has numerous tie-ins with the participants’ physical abilities, their cultural backgrounds and everyday lives, as well as the contemporaneity and history of Zagreb. To distil it to an artistic design, expressed unambiguously in statements and interviews, to abstract the experiential and focus on the discursive, as critique would have us do, is to leave behind all the meanings found in this entanglement, impoverishing our understanding.

6. POSTCRITIQUE

What is the theoretical frame, then, within which a ‘radically empiricist’ reading of sound art situations could be conceptualized? A similar pragmatist sensibility can be found in the ‘postcritical turn’ in humanities of recent years. While it cannot be boiled down to a particular method or theoretical position, postcritique is defined by the drive to find intellectual alternatives to critique without sliding into complicity and co-option by the institutions of oppression (Anker and Felski Reference Anker, Felski, Anker and Felski2017). As Felski puts it in the introduction to Uses of Literature, postcritique implies a meeting between ‘a willingness to suspect [and] an eagerness to listen’ (Felski Reference Felski2008: 22). Thus, rather than assuming a politically agnostic position, a postcritical reading of sound art would require a double awareness: both to the affective and sensorial aspects of lived experience of sound and to the discursive and social structures that it is framed in – but approaching the latter through the lens of the former.

Felski finds such a meeting point in Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) as it ‘leaves room for the aleatory and the unexpected, the chancy and the contingent’ and allows to ‘clarify how agency is distributed among a larger cohort of social actors’ (Felski Reference Felski 2015: 152). As I have argued elsewhere, Latour’s reading of socialty as material (and, reciprocally, materiality as social) resonates deeply with the dualistic nature of sound as both a medium of social communication and a corporeal sensation (Keylin Reference Keylin2020).

One of the central tenets of ANT is the idea of non-human agency, although Latour’s interpretation of it is rather moderate and is reflected in the concept of mediation. According to Latour, non-human actors express their agency primarily through mediating – modifying, delimiting, redirecting etc. – human actions (Latour Reference Latour1994). Mediation ties together the aesthetic with the social, and by extension – the political. To Antoine Hennion, music “[constitutes] a whole theory of mediation in practice” (Reference Hennion2015: 1), as it emerges in social interaction between the musicians and their tools of trade. Felski, in turn, adapts mediation to her project of postcritical reading, pointing out that the materialities of the artworks ‘are not just channels for conveying predetermined meanings but compose and configure these meanings in specific ways’ (Felski Reference Felski2015: 164).

In order to explore the agency of artworks, Felski turns to the notion of affordance (which Latour and Hennion also mention in passing – see Latour Reference Latour2005: 72; Hennion Reference Hennion2016: 300). Coined by the American psychologist James Gibson, affordance refers to a relation between an actor and an environment (or an artefact) that determines the possibilities of action – what the former could do with the latter (Gibson Reference Gibson1979: 127). However, it can also exist between two (or more) actors, as according to Gibson, ‘behavior affords behavior’ (ibid.: 135). The relational character of affordance makes it a particularly valuable concept for the postcritical reading as it offers a horizontal perspective that ‘is neither subjective nor objective’ (Felski Reference Felski2015: 165) – that is to say, it safeguards the researcher from slipping into either the celebratory solipsism of ‘art for art’s sake’, or the omniscient paranoia of critique.

7. BENOÎT MAUBREY: SPEAKERS’ ARENA (2019)

I have used the concept of affordance in relation to the politics of sound art before, when I wrote about Benoît Maubrey’s Speaker Sculptures for his, as of summer 2020, yet unpublished catalogue. These sculptures, which Maubrey has been making since the 1980s, are enormous constructions, several metres tall, built from recycled loudspeakers and shaped into various architectural forms – temples, obelisks, gates, etc. They are also highly interactive, allowing the audience to broadcast their own sounds through all the loudspeakers in a number of ways: by calling a designated number, connecting their smartphones to the sculpture through Bluetooth, or just plugging in a microphone or an instrument.

It was this pronounced affording, the sculptures offering themselves to the audience to use for whatever ends they wish, that initially caught my analytical eye. Without having a previous first-hand experience with Speaker Sculptures, I speculated how they functioned as the ultimate open mic, giving the participants unpoliced means of performing in the public – which, after Hannah Arendt, I interpreted as performing politically (Arendt Reference Arendt1958: 22–78). But most notably for my argument, it was not necessary to be in the same physical space to interact with the sculptures; it could be done from the safety of one’s home. Thus, I argued, Speaker Sculptures afforded public – political – expression to people normally not visibly present in the public spaces, be it because of anxieties or fear of persecution (Keylin Reference Keylin and Maubrey2019).

In summer 2019, I went on a field trip to Berlin to do a microethnography of Speakers’ Arena, the latest of Maubrey’s Speaker Sculptures, for another project of mine. Arena’s architecture was that of an amphitheatre; in a subversion of a traditional arrangement, the sculpture served as both an active PA system and a place for the audience to sit, with loudspeakers facing their backs. Maubrey had expanded the number of possible interactions with the sculpture as well: besides the usual phone lines, Bluetooth and direct mic, there was also an opportunity to have the sculpture read one’s Twitter post in a robotic voice.Footnote ⁴

My encounter with Speakers’ Arena was framed by very different circumstance than the other two episodes recounted in this article. First, as I have just noted, I had already analysed these sculptures before. Second, I came to Berlin specifically to do research. Finally, I was already in the middle of writing this text, so my perception was readily attuned to the postcritical and autoethnographic sensibilities. In other words, I had a clear idea of what to listen for – which also disturbed me, and I tried to fight this narrowing of my listening in order to keep it open and unbiased. This battle was lost before it started, though, because of how entangled my writing had already been in the history of Arena: the project’s producer Stephan Kruhl had used my catalogue text in the funding application. Thus, the way I had seen and heard the politics of Speaker Sculptures already inherently framed the Speakers’ Arena and its presence in its particular site.

And it is a very particular site indeed. The Pallasseum residential complex, in the middle of which Arena stands, was built in the 1970s in place of the demolished Berlin Sportpalast – famous, among other things, for Goebbels’s ‘Total War’ speech delivered from its stage. The buildings were envisioned as a social housing project, yet as Kruhl, who had worked as a postman in the area in his student years, recalls, it quickly turned into an immigrant ghetto where people had five or six locks on their doors and a large number of the apartments stood empty. The neighbourhood’s condition improved greatly over the years, yet it retains its melting pot charm with people from over forty nations and all walks of life living there. The geographical site is also a meeting point of sorts between the gay village to the west, a gentrified area to the east and a red lights street to the north.

The first thing I noticed when arriving at the site of Speakers’ Arena was how quiet it was. Disproportionately so even: I could see the 4-metre tall structure from much further away than I could hear anything coming from its 300-something loudspeakers. I connected my phone to the sculpture and tried to play Laurie Anderson’s O Superman – I felt like Anderson’s electronically multiplied voice and her lyrics, both unsubtly political and poetically subtle, were a perfect match for the Arena’s aesthetics. Yet I could not help but be disappointed with how quiet it came out: I could only discern the words while sitting on the sculpture itself or standing directly in front of it. So much for making a political statement.

Yet this quietness itself was of course very politically charged. As Christabel Stirling notes in her article Sound Art/Street Life, sound does not necessarily connect. It can also articulate ‘the existence of resilient personal, social, and cultural differences’ that make up the public space and the conflicting claims various groups have to it (Stirling Reference Stirling2016). In Arena’s case – as with most others – the first actor to lay its claim was the State. Maubrey told me of the strict regulations imposed by Berlin law – the sculpture’s volume was strictly capped at 55 decibels. Ironically, art was allowed to make less noise than the street traffic, whose volume limit was five decibels higher. Even as quiet as it was, the sculpture and the participants’ performances with it had at least at one point attracted the attention of the police, who asked to see the legal permits for having a sound artwork in the streets.

At the same time, Arena was arguably the first of Speaker Sculptures to be installed in a public space proper – that is to say, in the middle of a residential complex. Maubrey’s previous works were installed on the museum grounds, such as Temple (2012), or in remote areas, such as Shrine (2015). The placement of the sculpture in a place where people actually lived was a source of anxiety for both the artist, as the work had already suffered from minor vandalism in its opening week, and the local residents. The locals had their worries assuaged initially by the Arena’s lack of volume, yet it remained to be seen how they will feel about it in a few months.

However, I also noticed that the quietness of the sculpture produced political affordances of its own. It encouraged the participants to actually sit on the sculpture, concentrating in a small area and attaining a certain closeness and intimacy between each other and the work. As some of the participants that I had spoken with readily acknowledged, Arena had encouraged them to talk to each other. In the few days I spent at Pallasstrasse, I could already see that happening, often across class or ethnic borders. The idea of public sound art connecting strangers has received much criticism – and critique – in the past years, yet in my observations of Arena it turned out to hold at least some truth.

8. POLITICAL AFFORDANCES

Looking back at my experiences and observations of Electrical Walks, Ispod Fontana and Speakers’ Arena, a threefold postcritical perspective on the politics of participatory sound art emerges. The concept of ‘political affordance’ applies to three things at once: how the participants make sense of the artwork; how the participants or institutions can use the artwork outside of purely aesthetic experiences; and how access to participation and artwork per se is carried out.

The affordance for meaning-making has been explored in relation to music by Tia DeNora, who adopted the concept as a middle ground between situating musical meaning squarely in the social context of its reception and imbuing musical texts with an inherent message. From the affordance perspective, ‘[t]hings found “in” music (even highly abstract aspects of music’s texture or structure) … serve as resources for elaborating knowledge and its categories, and, in this case, music may be understood to provide patterns against which that knowledge takes shape’ (DeNora Reference DeNora2003: 46–8). Music – and sound art just as much – affords, rather than determines, the meanings produced in the act of perception, and these meanings are relational, created in conjunction between the artwork, the audience and the context.

I engage with these meaning-making affordances most prominently in my encounter with the anti-theft gates in Electrical Walks. Taken outside of their here-and-now, these sounds do not amount to much, as Kim-Cohen rightfully notes. Yet together with the physical and visual environment where I find them, they created the conditions for me becoming aware of the distrustful and paranoid culture that places anti-theft gates everywhere. Similarly, wondering about why Speakers’ Arena sounds so quiet encourages one to reflect on how public the public space in fact is, and who gets to control its sonic environment. In other words, while participatory sound artworks do not necessarily engage in critique themselves, they facilitate opportunities – affordances – for the participants to exercise critical thinking.

However, it would not be worth it to talk about the whole postcritical perspective on sound art if all it did was turn ‘performing critique’ into ‘encouraging the audience to perform critique’. There are other meanings sound art affords me as well – when I empathise with the fictional homeless woman in Ispod Fontana, walking beside her voice past the sumptuous palaces; or when I listen to all kinds of people expressing themselves through Speakers’ Arena. Salome Voegelin in The Political Possibility of Sound argues that ‘sound, as material and as sonic sensibility, makes the possible thinkable in concrete terms and invites the impossible to reinvigorate an aesthetic and political consciousness and imagination’ (Voegelin Reference Voegelin2019: 5).

Without using that particular term, Voegelin largely lays out a project of a postcritical politics of listening. Citing the anthropologist Petra Rethmann, she proposes the politics of possibility as an alternative to the ‘politics of the antis’ – the politics ‘that can only imagine itself in terms of antagonism and opposition’ (Rethmann Reference Rethmann2013: 227–8). For Voegelin, sound is the privileged medium of this politics of the possible as ‘[listening] offers a portal into difference and the differently real and allows us to hear alternative slices on equal track’ (Voegelin Reference Voegelin2019: 27). Speakers’ Arena confronts me with both these kinds of politics. On the one hand, it sounds out, as Stirling describes, the conflicting agencies striving for control of the Pallasseum’s physical and acoustic spaces. But at the same time, it also sounds out the budding relationships between the strangers, presenting a sonic utopia of a society free of anti-immigrant prejudice. Where the harsh rhythmic sounds of anti-theft gates highlighted the culture of distrust, the possibility of sound – possibility to sound – that Arena offers the participants serves to build trust and mutual empathy.

Thus, the political possibility of sound, as Voegelin describes it, relates to both meaning-making and everyday uses of art, a second type of sound art’s political affordances. The idea of art having a use has been explored in relation to literature and music in the works of Felski (Reference Felski2008) and DeNora (Reference DeNora2000, Reference DeNora2013) and is an important step in reconfiguring perspective from focusing on artists to focusing on the participants that this article aims to achieve. The artist’s political intent, as Doris Sommer notes, can often remain just that, an intent, without any tangible repercussions in the real world (Sommer Reference Sommer2013: 51). At the same time, engaging with art can have a profound effect on its audience’s lives and be used for the betterment of it.

I have already reflected on two such uses of sound art in my text for Maubrey’s catalogue, discussing how his sculptures could serve, on the one hand, as ‘open megaphones’ for a political performance, and on the other hand, as therapeutic devices for people to practice public speaking from the safety of their homes (Keylin Reference Keylin and Maubrey2019). However, from my conversations with participants in Berlin, I learnt that in fact just having a free mic plugged into the sculpture standing in an open space was enough for some of them to overcome the anxieties of public performance. Similarly, talking to the riders of sonic bikes in Zagreb revealed that they felt more confident riding through their biking-unfriendly city with the support of the sound, and, as I mentioned earlier, some saw it as an opportunity to make a political statement.

Moreover, as Sommer discusses in her book The Work of Art in the World, it is not just the regular citizens that might find sound art useful, but also institutions. This does not imply the instrumentalisation of art – on the contrary, it is the particular virtues of art as an aesthetic experience that make it valuable for promoting social change: the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgement and the promotion of creative thinking and, not least, the sensory and intellectual pleasure (Sommer Reference Sommer2013: 3–4, 85). Sommer sees a particular value to participatory art in that ‘the very activity of art-making develops skills and imagination; it wrests some creative control over material and social constraints that might otherwise seem paralyzing’ (Sommer Reference Sommer2013: 51). The striking visuals of Speakers Arena and the extraordinary experience of interacting with it are precisely the qualities that make it effective in breaking down habitual distrust and prejudice and promoting connections. The institutional use of art here does not contradict the personal either: the sculpture serves both as a means of public self-expression for the participants and, at the same time, as a tool for revitalising the neighbourhood by the municipality.

The question that remains to be asked, however – and this is where critique makes a comeback in the postcritical – is who gets to participate. The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion constitute an important third aspect of the political affordances of sound art. The experience that the sonic bikes afford me will forever remain incomplete and incomparable with what it is supposed to be. On the other hand, the different ways of interacting with the Speakers’ Arena offer varying degrees of visibility and corporeal engagement extending its potential audience to those not comfortable with the typical open mic setup.

9. POSTCRITICAL LISTENING

In its privileging of the sensory and material over the discursive, sound art may look – to use a pointedly visual verb – politically indifferent and aesthetically indulgent. My ambition in this article was instead to try to listen to what sound art’s politics may sound like. Such postcritical autoethnographic listening reveals the emphasis sound art places on the particular and the minutiae: participatory meaning-making over artist statements, unsolicited acts of participation and individual uses of art over authorial or institutional control. The politics of sound art thus crystallises into a figure of affordance: a relation that emerges between the materiality of the artwork and the individual listener’s sensorium and opens up the field of political possibility. This relationality is not unique to sound art; it also does not make it free from the power relations that infuse the contemporary society. However, in foregrounding such political affordances, sound art and postcritical listening offer an alternative way of building relational structures and of thinking the politics of art.