Books by Caleb Kelly
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From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked,... more From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked, and broke audio media technologies to produce novel sounds and performances. Artists and musicians, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yasunao Tone, and Oval, pulled apart both playback devices (phonographs and compact disc players) and the recorded media (vinyl records and compact discs) to create an extended sound palette. In Cracked Media, Caleb Kelly explores how the deliberate utilization of the normally undesirable (a crack, a break) has become the site of productive creation. Cracked media, Kelly writes, slides across disciplines, through music, sound, and noise. Cracked media encompasses everything from Cage's silences and indeterminacies, to Paik's often humorous tape works, to the cold and clean sounds of digital glitch in the work of Tone and Oval. Kelly offers a detailed historical account of these practices, arguing that they can be read as precursors to contemporary new media.
Kelly looks at the nature of recording technology and the music industry in relation to the crack and the break, and discusses the various manifestations of noise, concluding that neither theories of recording nor theories of noise offer an adequate framework for understanding cracked media. Connecting the historical avant-garde to modern-day turntablism, and predigital destructive techniques to the digital ticks, pops, and clicks of the glitch, Kelly proposes new media theorizations of cracked media that focus on materiality and the everyday.
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Sound is one of a series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
The ‘sonic tu... more Sound is one of a series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
The ‘sonic turn’ in recent art reflects a wider cultural awareness that sight no longer dominates our perception or understanding of contemporary reality. The background buzz of myriad mechanically reproduced sounds increasingly mediates our lives. Tuning in to this incessant auditory stimulus some of our most influential artists have investigated the corporeal, cultural and political resonance.
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Papers & Articles by Caleb Kelly
Material Sound Catalogue Essay, 2018
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Wolf Notes
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Catalogue essay for an exhibition I curated.
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Interference: Journal of Audio Culture
In 2010, inside the walls of the heritage-listed grounds of the old Callan Park Hospital in the s... more In 2010, inside the walls of the heritage-listed grounds of the old Callan Park Hospital in the suburb of Rozelle, a small group of staff and students from Sydney College of the Arts established a modest garden. The project was dubbed TENDING. Taken at face value, TENDING is simply a garden developed to produce food and to provide an alternative gathering place for staff and students. There are millions of such gardens in the world and recently there have been numerous art projects established around gardens. However, behind the simplicity of the project resides a complex noise of voices, interest groups, heritage, power, ownership and conversation. This paper will unravel the noise just below the surface of the seemingly idyllic and silent spaces of Callan Park. It will look at how the simple act of creating a garden laid out the complex interactions between culture and nature, and signal and noise.
Keywords: TENDING; Noise; Sound; Sound in Art; Gardening in Art
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Published in Sounds of Then, Sounds of Now: Popular Music in Australia. eds. Shane Homan & Tony M... more Published in Sounds of Then, Sounds of Now: Popular Music in Australia. eds. Shane Homan & Tony Mitchell.Hobart: ACYS, 2008.
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The use of the laptop in performance causes various negative responses from the audience, who fee... more The use of the laptop in performance causes various negative responses from the audience, who feel a loss of spectacle and performativity in the action. This occurs as a result of the lack of gesture and visual cues from the performer and the loss of focus from the audience, who have no visual object to ground their aural experience. A shift in focus from an understanding of the visual spectacle in performance to that of aural performativity is needed. Once this is understood, the audience can approach the performance with a shifted focus and come to new understandings of the aural object and contemporary digital audio.
KEYWORDS: laptop, aurality, contemporary digital audio, performativity, Pimmon
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From the initial release of the CD in 1982, artists have tampered with the system to test it, com... more From the initial release of the CD in 1982, artists have tampered with the system to test it, compose with it and sample from it. The author examines the use of the cracked and manipulated CD in the work of Yasunao Tone, Nicolas Collins and Oval in relation to their differing approaches and the role of the CD in sound expansion. Tone and Collins are interested in indeterminacy and the benevolent catastrophe in composition, while Oval’s process has more in common with pop production and studio practices.
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Books by Caleb Kelly
Kelly looks at the nature of recording technology and the music industry in relation to the crack and the break, and discusses the various manifestations of noise, concluding that neither theories of recording nor theories of noise offer an adequate framework for understanding cracked media. Connecting the historical avant-garde to modern-day turntablism, and predigital destructive techniques to the digital ticks, pops, and clicks of the glitch, Kelly proposes new media theorizations of cracked media that focus on materiality and the everyday.
The ‘sonic turn’ in recent art reflects a wider cultural awareness that sight no longer dominates our perception or understanding of contemporary reality. The background buzz of myriad mechanically reproduced sounds increasingly mediates our lives. Tuning in to this incessant auditory stimulus some of our most influential artists have investigated the corporeal, cultural and political resonance.
Papers & Articles by Caleb Kelly
Keywords: TENDING; Noise; Sound; Sound in Art; Gardening in Art
KEYWORDS: laptop, aurality, contemporary digital audio, performativity, Pimmon
Kelly looks at the nature of recording technology and the music industry in relation to the crack and the break, and discusses the various manifestations of noise, concluding that neither theories of recording nor theories of noise offer an adequate framework for understanding cracked media. Connecting the historical avant-garde to modern-day turntablism, and predigital destructive techniques to the digital ticks, pops, and clicks of the glitch, Kelly proposes new media theorizations of cracked media that focus on materiality and the everyday.
The ‘sonic turn’ in recent art reflects a wider cultural awareness that sight no longer dominates our perception or understanding of contemporary reality. The background buzz of myriad mechanically reproduced sounds increasingly mediates our lives. Tuning in to this incessant auditory stimulus some of our most influential artists have investigated the corporeal, cultural and political resonance.
Keywords: TENDING; Noise; Sound; Sound in Art; Gardening in Art
KEYWORDS: laptop, aurality, contemporary digital audio, performativity, Pimmon