Architecture of Density

 

Re-post from Highsnobiety

• By Fritz Radtke

For about 20 years German photographer Michael Wolf has been living in Hong Kong – a city as beautiful and exciting as it is crowded. Being one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with an overall density of some 6,300 people per square kilometer, Hong Kong’s architecture is accordingly dominated by staggering highrise buildings. For his recent photo series ‘Architecture of Density’ Wolf has captured the city’s unique landscape. By removing skies and horizons, thus focusing on and highlighting the structures’ abstract elements, his photographs evoke a sense of endlessness – an ever-growing urban space.

Michael Wolf Website

When All You Do Is Do Then Why Not Do Nothing?

Re-post from This Is Tomorrow.

The Hidden Passengers

‘From the press release’

Productivity and growth are the philosophical premises of the present day. Working processes are being optimized to increase efficiency, working hours are being deregulated until the distinction between work and leisure time disappears. Artistic work seems to follow other criteria, but in this field too professionalisation and self-optimisation are on the rise. But what would happen if ‘doing nothing’ or ‘inaction’ were to become a source of inspiration for a refusal to produce.

New Ways of Doing Nothing devotes itself to a form of artistic production that opposes activity, doing and manufacturing, and instead gives an affirmative slant to forms of doing nothing, of refraining or asceticism. Here, refraining from something not only leads to a critical moment but also a creative one. New Ways of Doing Nothing – the title derives from Swedish artist Karl Holmqvist – focuses on positions in contemporary art in which ‘doing nothing’ generates its own potential with respect to the requirements (and impositions) of a society that concentrates on activity and productivity: for example in Natalie Czech’s variation on a diary entry by the Russian avant-garde poet Daniil Charms, who in 1937 noted: “Today I Wrote Nothing. Doesn’t Matter.”

Artists: Robert Breer, Alejandro Cesarco, Etienne Chambaud, Natalie Czech, Oskar Dawicki, Edith Dekyndt, Mathias Delplanque, Heinrich Dunst, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Marina Faust, Claire Fontaine, Ryan Gander, Lasse Schmidt, Hansen, Julia Hohenwarter, Karl Holmqvist, Sofia Hultén, Jiri Kovanda, Rivane Neuenschwander, George Perec/Bernard Queysanne, Superflex, Mario Garcia, Torres a. o.

UTOPIAN DREAMS FOR SURVIVING IN A WATERWORLD

Re-Blogged from Motherboard

Floating Utopias for the Age of Rising Seas

Written by

BRIAN MERCHANT

@bcmerchant

brian.merchant@vice.com

May 14, 2014 // 07:00 AM EST

 

A two mile-thick ice sheet in Antarctica is collapsing, which all but guarantees at least 10 feet of global sea level rise. That’s grim news for the 44 percent of the world’s population living in coastal areas, who now face the dire prospect of preparing for the coming tides. Developing the necessary engineering solutions, as well as plans to anticipate some inevitable social and economic destabilization, will prove a daunting challenge for millions of communities worldwide. Which is why, along with the engineers, we’re going to need utopianists.

In 1962, haunted by the specter of nuclear annihilation, the sociologist Lewis Mumford penned a new preface to his book, The Story of Utopias. He noted that utopianism tends to thrive when civilization is in turmoil, and that far from being useless pie-in-the-sky dreaming, our utopian myths, schemes, and fictions hint at what he terms society’s “potentialities.”  

“[E]very community possesses, in addition to its going institutions, a reservoir of potentialities, partly rooted in the past, still alive though hidden, and partly budding forth from new mutations, which open the way to further development,” Mumford wrote. In the face of utter destruction by the bomb, he said, there was nonetheless an opportunity to “renew in man himself the sense of his more-than-human potentialities.” 

Now, we’re faced with an existential crises of another stripe. Scientists have for the last few years considered a significant amount of global warming, and the sea level rise it brings with it, an inevitability. Now that we have a forebodingly certain baseline in place, it’s an apt time to look at some of the many utopian ideas that have quite literally—yeah, sorry—been floated to cope with the rising tides.

Image courtesy of Remizov

Floating Cities

I’ve been keeping a close eye on modern utopianism for the last couple years, and one of the most common themes is, unsurprisingly, floating cities.

Whether grandiose, or of the humbler variety, both sci-fi designers and urban planners are imagining how to raise our metropolises up to ride atop the rising tides. First, let’s look at what is maybe the most prevalent medium for modern utopianism on the internet—design fiction. You’ve maybe already seen some examples of the genre running through your feed; the self-sustaining, ark-like city designed to float in a globally-warmed world. 

This one, designed by Russian architect Alexander Remizov, is a “bioclimatic” ark—a self-sustaining, floating system designed to harbor insular communities of people in a disaster-ridden, high-tide world. It’s both apocalyptic and hopeful; we can keep our sleek modernist design and opulent lives, we modern-day Noahs decked out with smart tech, as the world ravages everything unfortunate enough to lie outside the walls we’ve built. 

According to Arch Daily, “Remizov envisioned this project as the house for the future which can be constructed quickly and withstand environmental disasters through its structural integrity.” Resilient, perfectly-organized floating domiciles aren’t just the focus of science fiction, though.

Image: NLE

In a poor neighborhood of Lagos, Nigeria—now Africa’s largest economy—local architects are trying to engineer an entire city to float. The first phase has been completed; the school is now essentially a moored boat. But the next phase of the African Water Cities Project is where the utopian planning begins in earnest.

According to Design Boom, “phase two includes the construction of floating housing units that can be interlocked or float independently… the houses will also contain a state-of-the-art device designed by Japanese company AIR Danshin Systems Inc that detects certain movements (such as earthquake tremors) and activated a compressor that pumps air into a chamber below the structure so that the dwellings may navigate safely over a flood plain.” It’s supposed to be completed by the end of this year, but as with most utopian schemes, it appears to be a bit behind schedule.

Floating Power

Nuclear energy was the original utopian energy source: boundless, clean, a triumph of science. To its advocates, it still reflects near-unlimited potential. So, to better suit our drowning world, MIT has made them float. These buoyed, modular reactors rise and fall with the seas; tsunamis ostensibly glance off them harmlessly, and they use the vast reservoir of ocean below them as a well for cooling water as they produce a font of clean energy.  Problems persist, of course; meltdowns or radioactive discharge are even more a terrifying specter at sea. 

Less controversial, but no less optimistic are other floating power sources; Singapore is getting ready to try out a pilot program for floating solar panels.

New Venices

If we cannot build utopian floating city-capsules, then perhaps we at least will be able to adapt our current infrastructure to the flood. Science fiction might offer some clues as to how.

The sci-fi historian Adam Roberts argues that “utopian writing becomes a sort of para-SF, entwining itself round the genre in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” Yet in traditional science fiction, it’s rare that irreversible climate change produces hopeful communities; Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 is the exceptional vision that does. 

“It was almost an ice-free planet now, with only Antarctica and Greenland holding on to much, and Greenland going fast. Sea level was therefore eleven meters higher than it had been before the changes,” Robinson writes. “This inundation of the coastline was one of the main drivers of the human disaster on Earth.” Pertinent words, those.

After a couple generations of terrible chaos, some degree of stability reemerged—as well as a New York City replete with Venetian canals laced between permanently submerged skyscrapers. Life, and its messy bustle, goes on: “A few parts of Manhattan’s ground still stood above the water, but most of it was drowned, the old streets now canals, the city an elongated Venice, a skyscraper Venice, a super Venice—which was a very beautiful thing to be. Indeed it was an oft-expressed cliche that the city had been improved by the flood.”

Floating Free Market Utopias

Image: Seasteading Institute 

It’s doubtful that libertarians like Peter Thiel are all that interested in fighting climate change; statistically speaking, most don’t consider it a pressing issue. But their long-gestating Seasteading communities, those floating free market utopias where the tech elite can innovate away without the burdensome shackles of government, incidentally appear primed to adapt to a high-tide planet.

Rising Prospects for Radical Change

From the beginning, Occupy Wall Street was a utopian project in the strictest sense—a leaderless, ultra-egalitarian activist community founded at the foot of its participants’ oppressor. Utopian projects are often most notable for how they illuminate the gulf between imperfect reality and their lofty aims, and the gulf OWS, was attempting to bridge was glaringly self-evident: Students, laborers, and average citizens couldn’t find work, while profits for the 1 percent soared. A radical adjustment to income equality was therefore in order.

When Hurricane Sandy, pulling from sea levels raised by climate change, washed over New York City, the movement’s ideals were again translated into action—and we saw a glimmer of how besieged coastal communities might organize to respond to crises. Decentralized, democratic, networked, and better organized than legacy aid efforts, Occupy Sandy empowered communities while delivering disaster relief. It proved Occupy could organize to provide shelter, health, food delivery, and other crucial services.

But, effective as it was, it also made the chasm to utopia again starkly evident, this time in the face of a harsh scientific reality—thousands of people are still without homes, and storms like this are going to keep coming. Occupy Sandy shows how far we need to travel before we’re ready for the disasters of the future—our institutions aren’t yet equipped to cope. 

That’s why we need to consider each of these utopian ideas (okay, maybe not the Steasteads). As Mumford says, even if the total vision they convey are ultimately impossible, they reveal the potentialities in our communities to first adequately imagine, then adapt, life beset by rising seas.

 

Science Fiction: New Death

Re post form: We Make Money Not Art

Science Fiction: New Death seeks to provoke the question – have the Sci Fi visions we once imagined of the future since become a reality? I guess we all know the answer to that one.

Dario Solman, Target Orbit

Jon Rafman, Hope Springs Eternal/Still Life (BetaMale)

Because i write mostly about art and science/technology, i’ve seen my fair share of exhibitions that reference scifi. However, FACT‘s latest show is the first one i’ve visited that is entirely dedicated to science-fiction and visual arts. And in this instance, science fiction isn’t explored as the ultimate future forecaster, it is rather the starting point of a reflection on our current condition, an invitation to explore how our relationship with technology has made our everyday lives increasingly look like it is set against the backdrop of a science fiction novel.

Inspired by the work of J.G. Ballard, our story looks to the bleak, man-made landscapes of the future and asks: What happens when virtual environments become indistinguishable from reality? Will our global culture allow us to choose where to live, and who will stop us? What will we do with knowledge that becomes freely available to all? With social platforms acting as camera, how will ‘selfies’ develop and what new forms of narcissism will thrive? What is it that we need to preserve, and what do we need to change? These questions are explored through intense visualisations of electronic communication, dystopian domestic interiors, and re-enactments of historical revolutionary moments.

New Death, a title which comes from a text that fantasy writer China Miéville wrote for the exhibition, is ominous but so are the glimpses that the participating artists give into the techno-mediated we’ve built ourselves: conditions of intensified surveillance and repression, border control, loss of citizenship, etc. Not everything is bleak and joyless in the show though. You can bounce off a trampoline and pretend you’re an astronaut, meet intelligent robots that attempt to avoid boredom at all costs, you can even participate to the exhibition by writing a story describing a dystopian near future. I don’t know what a sci-fi fan would make of the exhibition but i found it smart, provocative and thought-provoking.

Quick overview of the show:

Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Accomplice. Installation at FACT Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Accomplice. Installation at FACT-Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Accomplice. Installation at FACT-Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Accomplice. Installation at FACT-Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Accomplice is a small clique of social autonomous robots hidden behind one of FACT’s gallery walls. Because these machines are curious, they attempt to discover their environment and the first step to live new adventures is to break down the wall. Their mechanical arm relentlessly punches against the wall. In the process, they not only make holes, they are also acquiring knowledge: how the wall react to their poking, how to best expand their horizon and what it is like out there, on the other side of the wall.

As the wall disappears, the robots discover other creatures: the gallery visitors. The more they can see and hear, the more excited and active these robots are getting. Their behaviour, however, isn’t predictable and linear. As soon as the movements and noises made by the visitors or the colours and patterns they are wearing have become too familiar, the robots become bored. In a sense, the roles usually taken by the audience and the robots or the artefacts and the visitors are reversed: the robots are the spectators and the gallery goers perform for them.

I had a chance to talk with Rob Saunders at the press view. I scribbled our conversation on a bit of paper, lost it so i’m going to point you to this Robots Podcast: Curious & creative in which he talks about being inspired by Gordon Pask’sconversation theory, designing curious systems, the laws of novelty and the social structure that might evolve from them.

The Kazimier

The bits and pieces of walls laying unceremoniously on the floor and the unpredictable attitude of the Accomplice robots echo the exhibition experience that Venya Krutikov & Michael Lill of The Kazimier have designed for Science Fiction: New Death. They turned the FACT building into a disordered, stern and slightly disquieting space to navigate. Your movements inside the gallery might or might not be filmed. That poorly-lit corridor might be off limit. That door over there might open on another artworks or maybe it’s a dead end.

Sascha Pohflepp, Camera Futura

Sascha Pohflepp, Camera Futura

Sascha Pohflepp, Camera Futura

Before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon in 1969, the NASA elaborated various exercises to understand how man would move in microgravity. The experiments were not just simulations but “pre-enactments” of a new set of rules that we were about to enter, providing a window into the future through which NASA researchers collected not only data but also visual impressions. One suchexperiment was conducted at Stanford University in the mid-1960s by Thomas R. Kane. The applied mechanics professor had studied the ability of cats to spin their body mid-air so that they could securely land on their four paws. Kane would film a cat bouncing on a trampoline, study its movements, and then a gymnast in a spacesuit would try to reproduce the cat’s movements on the trampoline.

Sascha Pohflepp’s Camera Futura enables visitors to replicate the experiment. You are invited to wear a light space suit and jump on the trampoline while a camera captures your moves.

The energy stored in the trampoline’s springs amplifies the power of our muscles, so that we can briefly launch ourselves and experience an instant of relative weightlessness when falling back to Earth. Camera Futura captures images from that very instant. These photos allow for a glimpse of our brief moment in a post-gravity world. In a sense, they are impressions of ourselves from one of many futures.

Jae Rhim Lee, Infinity Burial Project Installation at FACT Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Jae Rhim Lee, Mushroom Death Suit #2

The Infinity Burial Project is an art project with an aim to help us accept the reality of our own death. It is also a very bold and practical alternative to current burial system. Once buried or cremated, our bodies do not just decompose and vanish, they also contribute to the deterioration of the environment by releasing the toxic pollutants that our bodies have accumulated over the course of the years: pesticides, preservatives and heavy metals such as lead and mercury.

Mushrooms, on the other hand, can detoxify soils.

Jae Rhim Lee has thus developed the Mushroom Death Suit, a burial suit infused with mushroom spores to assist the decomposition of human corpses. The outfit comes with capsules that contain infinity mushroom spores and other elements that speed decomposition and toxin remediation. Besides, an open source burial container, and a membership society devoted to the promotion of death awareness and acceptance and the practice of decompiculture (the cultivation of decomposing organisms).

Zach Blas, Facial Weaponization Suite

 

Facial Weaponization Suite is a playful but also dark critique of the silent and gradual rise of the use of biometric facial recognition software by governments to monitor citizens.
During a series of workshops, Zach Blas worked with members of specific minority communities (queers, black people, etc.) to create masks that are modeled from the aggregated facial data of participants. The amorphous and slightly sinister masks are then worn in public performances.

Masks remain an effective tool to prevent identification technologies from capturing, analyzing, archiving and identifying our face. The use of mask also refers to social movements that use masks as a sign of protests. From the Zapatista rebels, to Pussy Riot, Anonymous, etc.

Brad Butler and Karen Mirza, Deep State Installation at FACT Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Brad Butler and Karen Mirza, Deep State. Installation at FACT Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Brad Butler and Karen Mirza, Deep State. Installation at FACT Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death (photo FACT)

Brad Butler and Karen Mirza are presenting Deep State, a film scripted by science fiction author China Miéville. The film takes its title from the Turkish term “Derin Devlet,” meaning “state within the state,” and tells a story about the representation of political struggle, moments of crisis, solidarity, schisms and oppression.

The whole film, which overlays archive protest footage and performed interludes, is online:

At first, i wasn’t sure what to make of it but, as the images rolled on, i started connecting them to what was going on in Ukraine at the time of the press view of the show and i realized that at this very moment, maybe we still have a choice: we can be the people who raise their heads, protest and attempt to take some control back or we can be the people who are blindly herded into a society of control.

James Bridle, Homo Sacer, 2014. Installation at FACT-Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Close and Remote, Zone

Laurence Payot, 1 in a Million You

Mark Leckey, Pearl Vision. Installation at FACT-Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

 

CONCEPT OF SINCE

 

Whilst in Athens I started to bring together new work that form the basis for Concept Of Since and new project that I am planning on continuing when I head to Japan and on my next artist residency program.  The digital works that I have been developing tends to start thoughts and allows my mind to filter ideas that have been ongoing within my practice.  So this focus on process sometimes produces others works that can be apt and respond to my transient state or present landscape.  The Concept Of Since responds to works that I have been making since returning to art practice about 4/5 years ago.  These works have come full circle and whilst in Athens I realised that I respond to the individual and collective hang ups to events and monuments that have passed.  This reliance on an event, as a crutch to form all future decisions for me seems to hinder and these works that I produced a few years ago around the positivity of change and the potential it can contain relate to these new works that I am currently considering.

Whilst in Athens I was reflecting on my practice throughout and whilst taking notes wrote “things are different now”.  This sentence kept going round my head whilst I was mulling over new ideas and when I came to write it again I wrote “things now are different”.  I then realised that these four words could be presented in any formation and only relied on the person reading it to imply the meaning.  Having spent a lot of time in New Zealand sometimes I end my sentence on an up note.  Which sometimes makes a sentence sound more like a question whilst in the UK this is not the case and the same four words can be read completely different.  Just like how Merleau-Ponty describes space, it has many meanings and it is only how it is phrased/spoken that gives it meaning.

So the two works that formed part of the Unsettled Certainties exhibition were 2 of 24 initial works that form the start of the Concept Of Since.  These works though currently text based will start to move beyond this initial start point and manifest themselves in other mediums as I apply this concept.

Clarifying Considerations

A few weeks ago I was a participant on the Sound Tectonics workshops organised by Space Under Magazine in Athens.  Whilst there I was inundated with amazing input from different tutors all coming from various disciplines.  One such tutor Jon Goodbun presented us with a talk about Cybernetics, introducing us to concepts concerning complex systems and feedback loops.  This was my first real taste of these specific concepts and they struck a cord with elements with my art practice and within my work as a snowboard trainer.  Now that I have left Athens where I was on an artist residency run by SNEHTA I am now able to consolidate some of the things I experienced on Sound Tectonics and my time in Athens.  On researching more about Cybernetics its intriguing to realise the areas of science and humanities that it draws on or influences.  Obviously seeing its influence on art movements and artists is a direct concern.  One artist who seems to stand in both the cybernetics field as much as the art world is Roy Ascott.  This image of Roy giving a talk gave me more words and ideas to consider, some resonating instantly and others making me head to Google to find out more.  Just like my time on the Sound Tectonics and now following with this initial research I find myself engaged and enthused with the possibilities of what new perspectives can be learnt.

 

CLASS OF NOWHERE

“Around the Bay” pairs portraits of bayfront nodes with a brief historical profile, focusing on areas that blur the exchange between military and civilian, artificial and natural, industrial and residential, somewhere and nowhere. Matthew Coolidge

I have an ongoing fascination with the works of The Center For Land Use Interpretation (CLUI).  Today I have been reading a few articles and interviews with the Founder and Director Matthew Coolidge.  He has published a new book through CLUI titled:  Around the Bay: Man-Made Sites of Interest in the San Francisco Bay Region.  The interview with Amelia Taylor-Hochberg – Archinect discussed various elements of this book and also Coolidges’ work for CLUI and as lecturer.

The reason I started reading more was when I came across the class Coolidge use to facilitate at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.  The class was titled “Nowhere”.  This idea of a class about nowhere actually stopped me for a while.  Thinking about how would you start to discuss nowhere and then in turn realise that is there a nowhere as Coolidge goes onto discuss in one of the articles:

MC: The class was based on the idea that there is no nowhere. We used that kind of terminology for the first part, but it morphed into another kind of class, that perhaps I would have called “somewhere”, if we had to call it something. But it was all so that this idea of “nowhere” doesn’t exist; there is no “away”, you can go away but then you’re there. This notion of “someplace else” is just sort of obsolete, in the same way that the old idea of nature is obsolete. Everything’s been discovered and visited and inhabited and interacted with and is connected to everything else, in a sense of an ecology; interconnected in the broadest sense of the term is also something we think about.

But the class was meant to introduce, to challenge, that idea. Certainly there are the facts and reality situations, then there are our impressions and our beliefs, and those things are often in interesting contrast. I wanted to work with the students in examining a place that wasn’t in their consciousness; that was considered somewhere that they wouldn’t normally go. It was a curatorial practice program in the graduate department. We would go somewhere in southern Louisiana or wherever and experience the sense of being from somewhere else; of going there and trying to make sense of it and establish a place there, an interpretation of it. Each year the class created an impression and an interpretation, in the form of some exhibit or public program, related to the place we visited. And with a very conscious awareness of their view of it, as a type of interpretative mechanism between the viewer and the observer of the object. It was this idea of the subjectivity creating a sense of a place. That is a very subjective and interpretive thing. And in general, objective awareness is something that we’re awfully conscious of with everything we do — the view creates the object, and the medium that presents it modifies it. It’s impossible to really see objectively.

 

To read the rest of this interview please click here.

 

 

Heterotopian Studies

‘I am like the crawfish and advance sideways’

(Michel Foucault, 31st January 1979)

 

I read this quote on the front page of a really informative site around heterotopia.  Heterotopian Studies is a great site delving into depth the concept of Heterotopia.  This is an ongoing influence on the sites that i visit and engage with.  The site is written and updated by Peter Johnson.  Click here.

A return to books..

I go through phases of reading, I have never been a big reader of books, information yes but never whole books.  Whilst the last four years I have had to read books as part of my studies I am still no better.  Now being on an art residency where it is neither work or study I have a different desire again maybe not for whole books but I do feel an air of calm, less rush to do and time to enjoy doing.  The residency has a wee couple of bookshelves which on closer inspection have some really good books. Either someone has similar interests or the books define a time where artists like myself are engaging with similar issues.

 

This book by Marc Augé is one that I read parts and back to front for my dissertation.  Now its another read altogether and great to re-read parts that I have and to learn more about an area that has been informing my practice for some time.  Elements of this will allow me to bounce ideas with forthcoming sites that I consider and interact with for new sound works.  I may also try and find a book shop here in Athens where I can find some texts by Georges Perec.  I feel they would be good to read now free from writing and making work within a university setting.

I also did bring one book with me that I picked up whilst on exchange in New York whilst studying a sound art and interactive installation elective run by Liz Philips.  This was a big influence on where my thoughts have been in the last year and I hope now on this residency that I can pursue some of those ideas to a more finalised outcome.  The book has excellent texts by many different purveyors of sound music and art – Audio Culture

 

I will see what new books I end up reading whilst here in Athens.

The Power of Sound as an Art Form – New York Times

The Power of Sound as an Art Form

Re-posted from New York Times Online written by ELLA DELANY for original article click here:

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s “Conflicted Phonemes” (2012) is a visual interpretation of speech from Somali asylum seekers.

By ELLA DELANY

Published: October 3, 2013

The sounds of Indian activists chanting and reciting poems fill Tate Modern’s Project Space in London, part of Amar Kanwar’s “A Night of Prophecy” (2002). Nearby, Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s voice map, “Conflicted Phonemes” (2012), explores the influence of accent on Somali asylum seekers, offering a visual interpretation of their speech.

A still from Amar Kanwar’s “A Night of Prophecy” (2002), in which Indian activists are heard chanting poems.

The two works are part of the sound-art exhibition “Word.Sound.Power.” that, according to Tate Modern’s Web site, “takes a moment to listen to the harmony and dissonance of voices rising.”

Tate Modern is not alone in exploring art through the ears. “Sound art is having a moment right now,” Gascia Ouzounian, a lecturer at the Sonic Arts Research Center at Queen’s University Belfast, said by e-mail. “A wave of recent exhibitions has very much brought sound art to the attention of the wider public.”

That attention was captured with the opening in August of “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” the first-ever major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated to sound art. But the form is gaining prominence and acceptance in museums and galleries around the world, with the success of SoundFjord, a London gallery dedicated exclusively to sonic exhibitions and research; the exhibition “RPM: Sound Art China” traveling to Shanghai from Hamilton, New York, in October; and a slew of recent exhibitions in locations as diverse as Hong Kong, Paris and Karlsruhe, Germany.

“Artists brought sound into their work a long time ago,” Barbara London, the curator of the “Soundings” show at the Museum of Modern Art, explained, “yet working with the ‘material’ of sound as an art form and its conceptualization has recently expanded dramatically.”

The phenomenon is not limited to the United States. “In New York, as well as Stockholm, London, Milan, Kobe, Melbourne and Delhi, art centers known as “alternative spaces” emerged and for decades have supported the evolving sonic arts,” Ms. London said. “Sound art is a global phenomenon.”

Sound is at the heart of Dajuin Yao’s, work. He is based in Hangzhou, China. “China is one of the noisiest countries in the world,” Mr. Yao said, “and ‘sound art’ plays a very crucial and ironic role in the society here.” In “Garden of Buddhahood,” a piece by Mr. Yao, the audience walks between lotus lamps that play recordings of monks chanting. It is, the artist said, a subconscious tribute to Steve Reich’s celebrated “Come Out”— which uses a single source, a recording of Daniel Hamm, injured in the Harlem riots of 1964.

According to research by Seth Cluett of Princeton University, there were 128 sound art exhibitions in museums worldwide from 2000 to 2009, up from just 21 from 1970 to 1979; and Ms. Ouzounian said that over the past four years the number of sound art exhibitions has continued to rise rapidly. That expansion can, in many ways, be attributed to advances in technology, but also to a desire to push the boundaries of art.

In an international art world dominated by visual works, sound has long been perceived as a challenging and esoteric medium. Traditionally, the term has been used to describe works by artists who choose sound or hearing as a topic or medium, generally without musical notations or musicians to interpret. As far back as 1913, the Italian Futurist Luigi Rusollo wrote a manifesto titled “The Art of Noises,” in which he described the modern urban soundscape and its musicality.

Many artists and curators today have opted for a more flexible definition of the art form, rejecting experimental music or composition as a requisite but allowing for strong visual or conceptual components. In some cases, sound art has no aural elements at all. At the Museum of Modern Art, for instance, some exhibits, like Camille Norment’s “Triplight” are silent. That piece features an excavated, brightly lit 1955 Shure microphone that casts a pattern of flickering shadows.

Haroon Mirza, a London-based artist who was awarded the Silver Lion at the 54th Venice Biennale for his installations “Sick” and “The National Apvailion of Then and Now,” suggests these flexible boundaries can mask a superficial disdain from the visual art world toward sound. “I think the art world sometimes likes to take the easy option,” Mr. Mirza said.

Mr. Mirza warned that the recent interest in sound art may be of limited duration. “I would argue that the interest in sound art is more of a fad partly related to the 100th birthday of John Cage last year,” he said. Cage challenged conventional definitions of music, and his “4:33,” a work of silence, was considered by many to be more a philosophical statement than a musical composition.

Even at institutions of higher learning with a history of fairly traditional approaches to the arts, sound has made its way onto the curriculum. Columbia University in New York began offering this autumn a master’s degree in Sound Art, a joint program of its department of music and its school of the arts. Degrees in sound art are also available at the University of Brighton in England; at the Nordic Sound Art Program, which offers a master’s degree in partnership with various institutions in Scandinavia, and the Sonic Arts Research Center in Belfast, among others.

While sound-recording technology has been around for over a century, innovations continue to open fresh avenues of artistic exploration. For “Voice,” one of the pieces at the “Word. Sound. Power.” show at Tate Modern, for instance, the French-Norwegian artist Caroline Bergvall used a transducer that transforms the surface it is placed on into an output speaker. “Placed on my entrance window,” she said, “the viewer walks through a relocated voice. This technology was not available even a few years ago.”

“We now see artists making use of new technologies including multichannel audio systems, computer-programming software, and computer-mediated sound spatialization, for example in installations by the French artist Cédric Maridet,” said Yang Yeung, a Hong Kong-based curator and the founder of an organization calledSoundpocket.

Even a mobile phone can become a creative force. Surabhi Saraf, an Indian sound artist and performer, attaches a tiny stereo microphone to hers. Ms. Saraf’s “Grains,” shown at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco in May, explored the idea of a single grain of sound. Layers of Ms. Saraf’s vocals were combined with recordings of trickling grains, and the auditory experience was enhanced by live image projections.

The growing affordability of recording devices, combined with innovative new technologies, has helped sound become an increasingly entrenched part of the gallery and museum world, Ms. Bergvall said.

While some works consist of a simple file in MP3 format, installations can pose unique challenges for buyers and curators, as they can incorporate complex technological or gargantuan sculptural elements. Many museums and galleries remain wary of the medium because sound is deemed more intrusive than a sculpture or painting.

So far, neither Christie’s nor Sotheby’s has sold a work of sound art. But Benjamin Godsill, a contemporary art specialist at the auction house Phillips, sees strong potential for the sale of works featuring sound to private buyers. “The market has a tremendous ability to take the avant garde and find sellable items within it,” he said.

The Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard has sold installations, images and recordings of his work. “It is possible to change and adapt works of sound for different spaces,” Mr. Kirkegaard pointed out. “If you ask me, a sound art piece can be many things; photos, objects or things that only sound occasionally, or very, very quietly.”

In 2008, Mr. Kirkegaard sold four photos of the recording sites of his installation “Aion,” now at the Museum of Modern Art, to a private buyer. “Aion” features recordings created in abandoned spaces in Chernobyl, Ukraine.

If the visual art world continues to turn toward sound, more sales and commissions could follow — especially if sound artists are willing to adapt their works to different spaces. “I do hope that artists who are less known within the mainstream visual art world, but who have been influential within sound art will find increasingly sustained support,” Ms. Ouzounian said, mentioning the works of artists like Anna Friz, Christina Kubisch and Kaffe Matthews.

Still, it seems for many artists, sales are not the ultimate goal. “A lot of sound art is not made from an intention to be sold,” Ms. Saraf said. “It is more about the act of listening and experiencing the space in relation to the sound.”