Project based class taught by Jan St. Werner at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg Germany. DAF explores sound as an unstable art form which merges with other disciplines and yet makes strong claims for disciplinary autonomy. A critical awareness is developed of how sound as a field for artistic exploration is performed, produced, and distributed.
The class explores contemporary and historical practices that emerge outside of purely musical environments and investigates specific compositional developments of post-war modernity and electro-acoustic music, as well as non-musical disciplines related to the psychophysics of hearing and listening. Sound is understood as a means of artistic exploration through practical exercises, performances, installations, writing, recordings, diffusions and instruments building.
In Dynamic Acoustic Research a sound that is perceived – or rather thought – in front of or behind the inner ear, is regarded as equivalent to audible sound. The tool for that is a focus shift of the acoustic range: to search and explore with un-, over- and transdisciplinary methods as a performative self-experiment and with a permanently self-modifying interest, that has no rigidly defined program. Composition is conceived as a finding with maximum attentiveness involving all affects of the perception process.
By means of the concept of the hearing in front of or behind the inner ear a »multi-perspectivity« is applied to the act of hearing – i.e. a sonic art that does not only take place in the ear, but that also makes use of intensive hearing and listening inwards and outwards. In order to achieve this »inter-est« is the matrix of reception in the future: As an artist I will have to ask myself to what extent I am able to invest my inter-est – understood as an intellectual effort – in a structural documentation of real and discursive sounds, for missed, unheard, and outrageous things. How far can we differentiate this inter-est?
Lead by passions (affect, emotion, sensation) and the [calculating] deliberations (intention, reflection, purposefulness). In our researching experiments passions and deliberations should be brought into resonance – an inter-est in the in-between: between the others, the sounds and the devices. For all this Prof. Jan St. Werner favours an interest on the part of the students in a collective process of learning in order to explore something unknown – something undetermined.
The Jazz musician Ornette Coleman stated:
By learning with others you can get instant feedback from other creative minds (each bringing to the table different experiences and insights) DURING the learning process. This enables a kind of collective experience that can be drawn upon when internalizing information the first time. […] Performing music in a creative group is collective learning as is playing in a big band of some sort, but I'm speaking now of collective learning in the more general and traditional concept of studying and conceptualizing together with others.
Everyone should get involved in this collective process: to experience and to deffraction oneself through the reaction of others like a filtered, modulated and amplified feedback. In this process a space is generated with the sound material, in which new connections should be established in a playful manner by using modules. The goal of such collaborative space-time-situations is the deconstruction of all involved egos through different wire connections: openness and sensitivity for the others and the collective construction of reality. This is meant to be the production environment of Dynamic Acoustic Research.
The class for Interactive Media / Dynamic Acoustic Research has published a record entitled DAF01. During the Jahresausstellung 2017 sounds arose at the campus were recorded and simultaneously analysed, filtered, interconnected, arranged. By using a mixing desk the students created their individually interpreted melody of the Jahresausstellung. The record sold by A-Musik is also available upon request (akstaller@adbk-nuernberg.de).
Furthermore, the class for Interactive Media / Dynamic Acoustic Research has established a radio station transmitting acoustical experiments. It can be received online via http://81.169.184.35/.
