Douglas Kahn
FO(A)RM N°4 (Magazine + CD)
FO(A)RM no. 4 (topography) treats the movement over, through or across a landscape and the act of documenting, utilizing or noticing an interaction with that landscape. It concerns a mapping of the points between self and space – traversing and/or transforming natural and urban environments. Within these pages, intelligent perspectives find fertile soil.Included within are essays by sound theorist Douglas Kahn (Noise Water Meat) on spherics and and cultural theorist Steven Connor (Dumbstruck) on…
Source Music of the Avant-garde, 1966–1973 (Book)
*2023 stock* The journal Source: Music of the Avant-garde was and remains a seminal source for materials on the heyday of experimental music and arts. Conceived in 1966 and published to 1973, it included some of the most important composers and artists of the time: John Cage, Harry Partch, David Tudor, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Steve Reich, and many others. A pathbreaking publication, Source documented crucial changes in performance practice an…
Mainframe Experimentalism Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts (Book)
*2023 stock* Mainframe Experimentalism challenges the conventional wisdom that the digital arts arose out of Silicon Valley’s technological revolutions in the 1970s. In fact, in the 1960s, a diverse array of artists, musicians, poets, writers, and filmmakers around the world were engaging with mainframe and mini-computers to create innovative new artworks that contradict the stereotypes of "computer art." Juxtaposing the original works alongside scholarly contributions by well-established and em…
Earth Sound Earth Signal Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Book)
*2023 stock* Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts, from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Douglas Kahn begins by evoking the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing along telegraph lines and the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard through the first telephone; he then traces the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s…