It exists on its own and »is occupied,« wrote John Cage, »with the performance of its own characteristics.«7 No longer a series of discrete, causal steps, it can be classified as a »transmission in all directions from the field’s center.« Physical, yet invisible; immaterial, yet capable of shattering substances and rattling structures.

We are faced here with having to describe the purity of something beyond language, directly experienced in and through bodies, vessels, containers, housings, apparatuses, and substances. An intensity that exists over time. A material that produces a new form rather than representing something existing. An energy without an established sequence of hierarchy, passing through an endless cycle of growth and decay. A »passage without trace,« as Jean-Francois Lyotard named this »monadic force without purpose or goal, representation or identification.«8 Its behaviour and transformation, its characteristics of duration, pitch, amplitude, frequency, and timbre become its content, and this content is the experience of its own unique intensity. Some even say it is the genesis of life itself; a shifting, dynamic, pre-individual field of virtualities and endless becomings.

As artists, composers, designers and technicians, scholars, writers, and critics, we think we know the substance and material I describe above – that is, sound. The word was etymologically derived from the Latin word sonus, which signified a sensation perceived by the ear. Yet, despite prodigious work from scholars (not to mention sonic prone artists) over the last 30 years in new fields like sound studies which has sought to understand the socio-technical as well as cultural origins and uses of auditory culture in an effort to remedy what Douglas Kahn famously called »the deaf century« – we are all still continually faced with having to describe and manipulate something akin to the invisible – a force and friction that moves through and around while also changing bodies.

»It’s all vibrating with a vital force. Whether it was fabricated by machine or fell from the side of a mountain underneath the erosion of water. All that stuff is moving in different scales and times and it’s moving with what I believe is some sort of vitality. And that’s the vitality that is perceptible (as sound) when one decides to pay attention to the vibration around oneself,« – Bruce Odland.9

How to confront such a phenomenon that undergoes states of continual transformation? Vibrations that emanate from a disturbance; their affects by which all kinds of bodies are transformed into what Steve Goodman called a »resonating vessel;« that crystalline moment when those vibrations transcend a threshold, meeting an organ that decodes and allows them to make their transition from the vibratory to the audibly or even haptically perceived – that moment in which we sense.

This journey of matter, of compressed and rarefacted molecules of air making their way from the physical to the psycho-social-cultural via the technical is the stuff of all of the artists and researchers involved in CTM 2015’s Un Tune theme, or, perhaps more appropriately, un-sound. I say un-sound in the sense that simply stating we are »sound artists« is somewhat of a misnomer.

Unlike other artistic materials such as paint, clay, or even the human body, sound itself is, in fact, not really a medium, since the word itself, etymologically speaking, describes not a thing but a sensation – a psychological condition. For something to sound signifies that it needs a perceiving organ, be it the ears, brains, and bodies of humans, animals, or other potentially listening forms that might be adrift in the universe beyond our knowledge and comprehension. Quantum mechanics debates aside, when we say we are artists and musicians working with sound, what we really mean is that we are artists who work with waves that travel through a medium (as opposed to light) and take their physical form as mechanically felt sensations.10

To state it more boldly, to work with waves that eventually may take their form as sound is to work with the very stuff of the world itself, what the sociologist of science Andrew Pickering has called its material agency – that is, to experiment with what such waves do as material forces that partially constitute the world.11 You don’t have to take my or Pickering’s word for it. After all, Hindu cosmology argues that sound (nada) is at the heart of creation and that the world emerges from vibration, symbolised in the sacred syllable Om.   

To think about a wave’s material agency is thus to step outside of our comfort zone; to abandon the sense that we really can know it and, more importantly, to give up on the assumption that there is an unblemished, pure path of experience from the artist and the artistic work to the listener that is outside of other forces, namely, the socio-technical apparatuses that newly construct and constitute us as listening subjects everyday. Indeed, as sociologists and anthropologists of science have long told us, phenomena like waves, as many of the other objects discovered by science, are not pre-given in the world but only come about tenuously and temporally through instruments and processes. In the process of what philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard called phenomenotechnique, the construction of an object of knowledge or experience is partly achieved through these instruments – devices that assist in »purifying...natural substances and thus bringing order into nebulous phenomena.«12 Similarly, the descriptive machineries of natural sciences like physics offer us language for the action and qualities that waves enact: elasticity, plasticity, force, strength, strain, resonance. These are qualities also outside of human or animal perception and cognition but which constitute what we eventually come to perceive as the aural and the tactile.

Can we, as artists who work with waves in all aspects of our aesthetic lives, then really know their material agency? Strangely enough, a Cambridge University archaeologist gives us a way to address this question. In enlisting Pickering’s concept of material agency, researcher Lambros Malafouris focuses on one of the most primal creative acts of working with materials: pottery making. Malfouris asks a relatively simple question. Who or what makes the pottery? The classical story that we are taught in art school and that is continually reinforced in the newspaper feuilletons is that the object springs from our heads, filled with inspiration and genius, and magically appears in the world, anxiously awaiting decoding and interpretation – that is, meaning – from the observer or listener. This is a story of intention, control, planning, and knowing the future.

But Malafouris has another story to tell. Within the artistic process of producing a piece of pottery, the clay on the wheel should be considered neither some external object of the potter’s intentional mental states (inspiration) nor a hunk of inert stuff, but co-constitutive components of the overall pottery experience. There is a continual interplay between the potter and the wheel/clay not because there are locked-in, pre-inscribed actions to be expressed in either entity but because the spatio-temporal dynamics of the situation and the environment bring forth and enable certain actions in an always contingent and potentially unknown (and unknowable) way.14

In other words, the spinning clay wheel, the thickness, wetness, and age of the clay, the hands of the sculptor, and the degree of light in the room all exert a pull on each other, shifting in intensity, influencing and shaping the level of »material engagement« that transpires between the sculptor and the »matter« at hand in an ongoing process of temporal evolution.

Malafouris’ concept of material engagement is extremely powerful. It suggests that agency is not located in objects or things but rather situated in practice; it is »the flow of activity itself.« »Agency is in constant flux, an in-between state that constantly violates and transgresses the physical boundaries of the elements that constitute it.«20 It becomes alien, defying our attempts to control it, seeping across the stuff of the world, unbounded, not subjected to containment within rigidly defined categories such as subject or object, human or animal. It escapes position, location – all of those spatial metaphors that continually aim to prove that if we can locate or map something we can thus know it.

The concept of waves and eventually sounds as alien agencies that exist in between humans, instruments, and forces in the world also suggests something else; a place where that concept of affect, the preconscious, precognitive impact of things, bodies, forces at a distance on other bodies, can now rear its hydra-like head.

Affect describes a feeling, a sense, an in-between state that impacts bodies but can’t easily be localised. As Félix Guattari argued, affects are »installed ›before‹ the circumscription of identities and manifested by un-locatable transferences, un-locatable with regard to their origin as well as with regard to their destination.«21 Yet, if audio-visual perception by way of hearing and seeing seems lodged in subjects, in the tiny nerves, ossicles, and retinal blood vessels, mucous-like materials and liquids that flow through and constitute ears and eyes, brains and bodies, then affects do something else. They move through and circulate within the world without specific landing sites.

Starting with Spinoza and moving down through the philosophical, cultural studies, and literary canon of work from Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, and more recently, Brian Massumi, Patricia Clough, Steven Shaviro, Marie-Luise Angerer, and others, the genealogy of the culturally denoted concept of affect lies beyond this brief foray into un-sound.22 But the debate about whether affects are pre- or post- social, pre- or post- cultural, are trapped in or liberated from questions of identity and subjectivity, or enabled, halted, or transformed through the social-technical world of things – processes and entities beyond strictly human acts that have much to do with un-sound and its singular power which, despite our attempts to know, harness, and control it – somehow always slips from our human-driven grasp.

In his late work titled Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze dealt with how each artform uses its own materials and forms to render what he termed the »invisible.« Sensation occurs in the painter Francis Bacon’s work through the combination of painted, »hysterised« sensations and the individual perceiver engaging directly with the rhythms and resonances of the disintegrating figures and objects in the paintings. Bacon’s paintings hold a power which »overflows all domains and traverses them.«23

What Bacon paints in his numerous tableaux is not an object but a tangible someone or something experiencing the lived sensations of transformation. Bacon’s tormented images vibrate with the experience of their own sensation; they jump back and forth between the recognisable and the irrational, forming »zones« of intensities, of affects that circulate in and around us. The images modulate before our vision, creating a world that moves between the concrete and the metaphysical. »Intensity,« says Deleuze about our experience of Bacon’s world, »is simultaneously the imperceptible and that which can be sensed.« It is the experience of a chill that travels down the spine at the thought or sight of something undefinable; an imperceptible force felt through the skin.

Deleuze was no stranger to either thinking in terms of concepts of intensity through waves or to those who work with waves’ intensities. As many readers of this article know, after Deleuze’s death in 1995, Achim Szepanski’s Frankfurt-based avant-garde Mille Plateaux label issued a two-CD tribute to the philosopher, entitled In Memoriam: Gilles Deleuze, and featuring the work of half a dozen composers and sound artists including Chris and Cosey, Jim O’Rourke, Scanner, Mouse on Mars, and others.

Moreover, throughout their writings, Deleuze and his foil and intellectual partner in crime Félix Guattari continually invoked sound and its creators like Cage, Busotti, and Nono from the far reaches of the 20th century musical avant-garde in their attempts to articulate the invisible. Indeed, artists work not with images or sounds (or un-sounds) but with intensities and affects. Artists aim »to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations. A method is needed, and this varies with every artist and forms part of the work.«24

Concepts like the affect and alien agency of un-sound may thus assist in helping shatter our old human-exceptionalist world-views of what it means to work with and listen to waves in the 21st century. Instead, the way un-sound comes about through entanglements of artists, technical instrumentariums of hardware and software, psycho-social conditions, and the environment itself rewrites the old narratives and suggests new stories: waves as phenomena and the perception of such phenomena may not strictly signify localised sense making in the body anymore. As un-sound artists we may only partially command the material we are working with; as listeners we may be subject to the interloping of other agencies and forces in the act of perceiving; as humans we may never really come to know those waves and their behaviours and actions that constitute and make marks on the world.

Yet, that un-sounds are alien doesn’t rid us of the human or imply a world of objects without us. Quite the contrary: it makes us realise that to be human today is to be mutable, transforming, alive with the possibilities of technoscientifically saturated life by which we will be thwarted in our attempts to harness and control it. In these conditions, perception between un-sound, the machine, and the perceiver blurs. It emerges from and latches onto affects flowing through the world and not the other way around.

• CTM 2015: Alien Agency II: Encountering Art with Sound in the Making. Lecture by Chris Salter by CTM Festival

• CTM 2015: Alien Agency II: Encountering Art with Sound in the Making. Lecture by Chris Salter by CTM Festival

• CTM 2015: Alien Agency III: The Torment of the Hum. Lecture by Eleni Ikoniadou by CTM Festival

• CTM 2015: Alien Agency III: The Torment of the Hum. Lecture by Eleni Ikoniadou by CTM Festival

• CTM 2015: Alien Agency IV: Material Agency, Art, Experimental Life. C. Salter and A. Pickering by CTM Festival

• CTM 2015: Alien Agency IV: Material Agency, Art, Experimental Life. C. Salter and A. Pickering by CTM Festival