These Contemporary Sound Artists Are Changing the Soundscape of Art

The origin of sound art could be traced down to the avant-garde experiments undertaken at the beginning of the 20th century. In the Western art context, the Futurists were the first to conduct such pieces, such as Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumori, an instrument built to perform the music described in his The Art of Noises manifesto. The experiments developed by Dadaists and Surrealists followed, and after WW II, sound art exploded around the Fluxus movement, especially the activity of John Cage, on one hand, and the Musique concrete promoted by Pierre Schaeffer, on the other hand.

The term was first used in the 1970s and gained a particular reputation after a major museum exhibition, Sound Art, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) in 1979. Throughout the decades, there has been an ongoing debate about the proper use of the term due to the diversity of approaches. Sound experiments emerged from conceptual art and minimalism and had different trajectories spanning from sound poetry over the spoken word to sound installation.

We selected eight contemporary sound artists who are continually expanding the notion of the medium. 

Featured image: Ryoji Ikeda, test pattern [no.5], 2013, audiovisual installation at Carriageworks. Commissioned and presented by Carriageworks and ISEA2013 in collaboration with Vivid Sydney. Image Zan Wimberley. Image via Creative Commons.

Camille Norment

An Oslo-based multimedia practitioner, Camille Norment isa visual artist, but also a musician and composer. Together with Vegar Vårdal and Håvard Skaset, Norment forms the Camille Norment Trio. She started investigating different socio-cultural phenomena by using the medium of sound throughout the decades. Before being selected to represent Norway at the Venice Biennale in 2015, Norment produced several significant commissions.

Under the title Plexus, a new site-specific commission is currently on display at Dia Chelsea. The work addresses the impact of the maritime industry on the Chelsea area while speaking about spirituality, power, and political resistance.

Featured image: Camille Norment at Venice Biennial, Oslo 2015. Image Creative Commons.

Christine Sun Kim

Christine Sun Kim is an American sound artist based in Berlin. She works mainly with drawing, performance, and video while exploring the role of sound in society. The artist explores the operations of sound and various aspects of Deaf culture, and her signature visual language was inspired by a variety of information systems. By appropriating written language, musical notation, and American Sign Language (ASL), Sun Kim creates compelling sound art that has been institutionally recognized. She further deals with sound to determine her own relationship to verbal languages and her environment.

Featured image: Christine Sun Kim, Cambridge, 2015. Image Creative Commons.

Zimoun

A self-taught Bern-based artist, Zimoun is best known for his sound sculptures, sound architecture, and installation art made of industrial materials such as plastic bags, cardboard boxes, old furniture, motors, wires, microphones, speakers, and ventilators. The artist was much influenced by the above-mentioned composer and artist John Cage, who had a seminal impact on his work in his formative years. However, Zimoun doesn’t just deal with formal aspects of a sound piece; instead, he questions technology’s place in daily life. His practice spans architectural interventions, sound sculptures, and various audio works that ambient music, sound art, and minimal techno.

Featured image: Zimoun – 24 sound contributions in an automat, 2005. Exhibition view: Museum of Fine Arts Bern, Switzerland. Image Creative Commons.

Ryoji Ikeda

A leading Japanese electronic composer and visual artist, Ryoji Ikeda is known for pioneering a new type of electronic music by employing sharp techniques and aesthetics. Through his work, with mathematical precision, the artist explores the essential characteristics of sound. Over the years, Ikeda gained a reputation for expressing himself through visual and sonic media in equal measure by meticulously using sound, light, and physical phenomena for the sake of immersive live performances and installations.

Featured image: Ryoji Ikeda – Data Tron, 2010. Transmediale. Image Creative Commons.

Janet Cardiff

Canadian artist Janet Cardiff works primarily with sound and sound installations, often collaborating with her husband, George Bures Miller. Around the mid-1990s, she gained international acclaim in the art world for her audio walks. Informed by her studies, Cardiff initially worked with photography and printmaking, but after a Super-8 film titled The Guardian Angel she created with Bures Miller in 1983, her work started transforming towards sound art.

Her first major work based on recorded sound was called The Whispering Room, a minimal installation consisting of 16 small round speakers positioned on stands that feature the voice of individual characters. Her works have been awarded and exhibited in various institutions throughout the decades. In 2001, Cardiff had a successful retrospective, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works, Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller, at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center.

Featured image: Sound installation ARoS in connection with the exhibition JANET CARDIFF AND GEORGE BURES MILLER – SOMETHING STRANGE THIS WAY, where Janet Cardiff’s sound work The Forty Part Motet (2001), a reinterpretation of a choral movement from 1573 entitled SPEM in Alium by Thomas Tallis. Image Creative Commons.

Susan Philipsz

Although originally a sculptor, Susan Mary Philipsz is acknowledged for her unique sound installations, primarily based on acapella versions of songs. The key element of Philipsz’s work focused on the psychological and sculptural dimensions of sound is her untrained, average voice and the fact she cannot read or write sheet music. For instance, in 1998, she produced the piece Filter consisting of versions of songs by Nirvana, Marianne Faithfull, Radiohead, and The Velvet Underground, which has been played at a bus station and a supermarket. In 2010, Susan Philipsz won the Turner Prize.

Featured image: The loudspeakers on the west breakwater at the entrance to Ystad harbour, for Susan Philipsz’s sound installation “The Distant Sound”. Image Creative Commons.

Christian Marclay

Christian Marclay is a Swiss-American visual artist and composer who investigates the connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film. He is a pioneer in using gramophone records and turntables as musical instruments. Under the influence of John Cage, Vito Acconci, and Yoko Ono, Marclay explored the rituals around making and collecting music. Marclay sometimes damages records to produce continuous loops, and so he uses cheap and used records purchased at thrift shops. Some of his musical pieces are well recorded and sampled. Marclay is also into free improvisation. In recent years, he has produced visual art based on the representations of sound.

Featured image: Christian Marclay at Hallwalls in Buffalo, New York, 16 November 1985. Image Creative Commons.

Samson Young

A Hong-Kong artist, Samson Young mainly works with sound performance and installations. His work is rooted in music composition yet very much political as the artist deals with military history and the British occupation of Hong Kong. Young’s works have been included in numerous exhibitions, and he was a recipient of the Bloomberg Emerging Artist Award in 2007 and the BMW Art Journey award in 2015. Alongside his artistic career, Young was an assistant professor in sonic art and physical computing at the School of Creative Media in Hong Kong, a frequent collaborator at the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Musical Expression (L.U.M.E), and artistic director of the experimental sound organization Contemporary Musiking.