VISUAL CULTURE
Rob Stone: Profile
Rob Stone’s current research focuses on the often delphic relations that have developed between architecture and sound over the past sixty or seventy years. This is the subject of his forthcoming book Auditions: Architecture and Aurality, to be published by MIT Press in 2007.
This has developed out of a longstanding interest in what makes itself critically and historically available for attention at the intersection of modern acoustic and architectural dimensions. Central to this study are a set of ideas relating to inhabitation, ambiguity, an assessment of anecdotal time and place, and a notion of what composer Morton Feldman once called the ‘uninfluential’. Established aural-architectural instances, like the fraught relationship between composer Iannis Xenakis and architect Le Corbusier, for instance, or the spatial aspects of British and American experimental music are important to this work. However, there are a set of more frankly intriguing and indeterminate features of modernity at stake, too. Poolside splashes, furtive rustling in municipal parks, the mewling of domestic fauna, the intrusiveness of overheard personal stereo, silences on passenger transport systems; from each of these depend different political and cultural issues which, when animated, can ghost-in the lineaments of an otherwise imperceptible array of modern cultural gestures.
