Reading Machines: Ambient Writing and the Poetics of Atmospheric Media

Alec Mapes-Frances, 2017
“The widespread presence of the “ambient” in contemporary art and technology has not, of course, been without its skeptics. The art historian Seth Kim-Cohen has written a book called Against Ambience, a polemic aimed at the art world’s fascination with ambient aesthetics, which Kim-Cohen sees expressed in recent large-scale exhibitions of Minimal and post-Minimal Light and Space work (Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, et al.). Kim-Cohen’s primary contention is that such atmospheric works are too purely perceptual, that their “warm glows” and “soothing washes” are not “self-aware” or “conceptually concerned” enough to address the crises of the information age.

“The ambient, in both its sonic and visual incarnations, describes a closed system,” he writes. “The sites of transmission and reception are identical. Nothing changes, nothing moves. It is ascetic and abstinent. Its apparent (desired) purity is but an abnegation of participation in the social, communicative, and critical realms.” This impoverished account of ambient aesthetics basically excludes 5 criticality as such from the category of ambient art, ambient music, or ambient poetry. It is a familiar account, one that sees the soft, the diffuse, and the therapeutic as incompatible with the traditionally hard edges of avant-gardist demystification.”
Shelving
Sound / Music, 
Theory / Essay