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, Andre 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, Varese, and Cage; the contorted radio talk show delivered by Antonin Artaud; the labyrinthine inner journeys invoked by German Hoerspiel; and the razor contamination and cut-up ventriloquism of William S. Burroughs.
“…One would expect to find the accumulation of studies of modernism, post-modernism, the avant-garde, and post-war experimentalism a more faithful attendance to the cultural preoccupations of hearing— one of the two major senses, the “public” ones, as John Cage described them for their ability to make contact from a distance— especially when one remembers that there are few arts that are mute. It would also be reasonable to expect a stronger curiosity about earlier artistic responses to the audio and radiophonic technologies that so successfully submerge us now in a mass-media din. Yet the literature on the arts of recorded and broadcasted sound, and of conceptual, literary, and performative sound, is scant at all levels, from basic historical research to theoretical modelings. Thus, while other historical fields may be busying themselves with things more detailed, the study of relationships of sound and radio to the arts is open to a full range of investigations, including the most general…”
Contributed by
Juan Pablo Macías