WRITING OUT SOUND: IMMERSION AND INSCRIPTION IN SOUND ART

Within the curation, theorization and production of sound art we find a predisposition towards immersion and interiority. It is argued herein that auditory culture’s perceived privilege with regard to immersion, immanence and interiority is not only inaccurate but limits the critical and epistemological scope of sonic practice. By initially situating this critique within the terms of Jacques Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism, the exteriority considered proper to writing yet antithetical to sonic immersion is taken up as an initial means of escape from the epistemological constraints of interiority. Initially using Derrida’s theory of writing to help unbind theorization of sound in the arts from affirmations of affective interiority, it is argued that Derrida does not take us far enough, leaving us in a situation where everything is reduced to a play of texts. Escape from the infinite play of signs is attempted through recourse to phonographic procedures and the work of Friedrich Kittler in order to ground the exteriority of writing in a notion of the real. Finally, with reference to basic definitions of sound and the work of artist Dawn Scarfe, it is argued that sound is always-already written in the real, prior to any phonographic act or textuality, and so consequently sound writes itself out of the circle of phenomenological interiority and immersion to which it is readily consigned.