Alyce Santoro

During the heat of the fraught political climate of 1969, the editors of SOURCE: Music of the Avant Garde invited 20 innovative composers and musicians to respond to a single question: “Have you, or has anyone, ever used your work for political or social ends?” Forty-five years later the author posed the same question to 20 unconventional composers working today, resulting in a provocative contemporary update to the original 1969 SOURCE article.

The contradictions inherent in European Enlightenment-based “logics” that externalize humans from “nature” were a concern for the Romantic Naturalists, Dadaists, and Surrealists. More recently, some in the environmental humanities and socio-ecologically-concerned arts and sciences have also posed challenges to anthropocentric, hierarchical, positivist modes of thought. I suggest that by engaging the ludic, imaginative, and collaborative while bearing the empirical in mind, dualisms (such as objective and subjective, individual and collective) dissipate, and existence as a dialectical state of intricate ensemble can be revealed. In light of catastrophic disruption to Earth’s life-sustaining processes by exploitative forms of human activity, I argue an “ecological imaginary” is urgently needed, and everyone is capable of contributing to its prefiguring.

During the heat of 1969s fraught political climate, editors of the legendary multi-media magazine “SOURCE: Music of the Avant Garde” invited 20 innovative composers and musicians to respond to a single question: “Have you, or has anyone, ever used your work for political or social ends?” Forty-five years later and in the midst of the latest variety of intense current events, sound/conceptual artist Alyce Santoro posed the same question to 20 unconventional composers working today, two of whom answered the question 45 years ago, and six more of whom had works published in SOURCE on other occasions.

To view both the complete original 1969 SOURCE article along with the 2015 responses for LMJ, please visit http://www.alycesantoro.com/politics_of_sound_art.html.

A treatise for the Summer 2015 issue of Chilean sound art journal AURAL on the ways that sound shapes our experience of living.

Upon developing an acute awareness of the psycho-social effects of atmosphere, we become what 20th century philosopher Henri Lefebvre (and Gaston Bachelard and Pinheiro dos Santos before him) termed “rhythmanalysts”: “Everywhere there is interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy there is rhythm”...[The rhythmanalyst] is capable of listening to a house, a street, a town as one listens to a symphony…”

Karen Barad’s concept of intraconnectedness brings to light paradoxes inherent in many commonly held views, not only with regard to science and the scientific method, but also involving common everyday perceptions. By identifying ourselves as simultaneously independent and interdependent, as both observer and observed, and of nature yet separate from it, a cognitive (quantum?) leap occurs: we begin to accept these perceived dualities as merely different sides of a single, shared coin. Suddenly all of us are participatory agents in a phenomenon that responds to our existence, because it IS our existence...all of our existences, all at once. How would our experience of reality be different if existence were commonly imagined to be a collective affair?

On the occasion of the 2018 March for Science, a few thoughts on why we need a science that is visionary and just – a Science for the People.

In order to make the world work for all humanity, Buckminster Fuller suggested that the focus should be on what he termed "comprehensive anticipatory design science". This kind of thinking is needed today; self-driving cars and rockets to Mars are dangerous distractions from accessible, regenerative, egalitarian solutions.