Inaugural Special Issue

12.12.12

Message from Editors

The Editors of Moebius welcome all forms of criticism, documentation, scholarship, and / or (electronic) art from current cultures from around the world. Our guiding metaphor is a Moebius strip in which theory and practice mutually inform one another. Our editorial approach is open to works, media, and discourses in any electronic form, from many points of view as long as they celebrate our Moebius metaphor. Wikipedia says: "The Moebius Strip has several curious properties". We like that.

Scholarly Articles

A Two-headed Zebrafish

Robert Zwijnenberg

- Some personal observations on the relevance and urgency of collaborations between art, science and technology -

I have been director of The Arts and Genomics Centre at Leiden University in the Netherlands for more than five years now.1 The Arts and Genomics Centre is active at the interface of art, science and technology, and we have focused from the outset on exploring new forms of collaboration between the humanities, the life sciences and the arts.

In this paper I will reflect on why I think it is necessary for artists and scholars to engage with the sciences and participate in art-science collaboration. I will explain why The Arts and Genomics Centre believes it is important to explore new forms of collaboration between the humanities, the life sciences and the arts. I will also discuss the rhetoric and pitfalls of art-science collaborations, and how we can avoid these pitfalls. In that sense this paper is also about the specific role [ ... ] continue to full article

Listening to the Soundscape And The Necessity of Double Description

David Dunn

Abstract

The cultural and explanatory modes of art and science are examined in the light of the concept of cultural violence and described as complementary aspects of metaphoric and mechanistic language use. An earlier precedence for such thinking is shown as is its current manifestation as part of the contemporary theory of “autopoiesis.” A natural history of such linguistically productive use is proposed and linked to an even larger history of evolving frames of environmental and musical auditory perception.

1) Cultural Violence in Art and Science
2) Metaphoric versus Mechanistic Language
3) Listening to the Soundscape and Environmental Hearing

“Without such metaphors for meditation, as correctives for the errors of human language and recent science, it seems that we have the capacity to be wrong in rather creative ways—so wrong that this world we cannot understand may become one [ ... ] continue to full article

Thresholds and Fragile States

David Dunn

1) Introduction

Several years ago I spent time living on a houseboat deep into the Atchafalaya Basin of Louisiana. Nights were spent making forays into the swamp to record continuous night sounds without interruption. One of the most striking features of this sound world was the abrupt transition between distinct collectives of sound makers. One group would hold center stage for hours and then suddenly fade to silence. Within minutes a whole new cast of sonic actors replaced them. The dynamic quality of these dense soundscapes, with their fantastic spatial motion, impressed upon me a sense that—beyond the communicative agenda of individual living sound generators—there was some underlying emergent logic at work to drive them into [ ... ] continue to full article

Music, Soundscape and Acoustic Sustainability

Barry Truax

1. Music and Environment

With environmental issues and the concept of sustainability being of current concern, some artists and musicians are considering their relationship to such issues, and asking what responsibility they might have as a result and what practical contributions they are qualified to make. Music in Western culture, I would argue, has become separated from its broader environmental context over the last two centuries, both in the classical tradition of privileging standardized performance spaces, and by the processes of commodification in the commercial context. When music is conceived as an abstract art form, it is not surprising that this separation from context, or more precisely, its inclusion in standardized contexts, becomes the norm. References to real-world imagery can be made in such music, but they remain at the level of metaphor in instrumental music and textual references in vocal music. The expansion of musical resources in the 20th century appeared to bring “non-musical” sounds and noises into the realm of composition, often in direct [ ... ] continue to full article