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Conversation: Sari Carel and Jonathan Sterne

September 30, 2011
Cabinet

300 Nevins Street

Brooklyn, NY
Talk

Artist Sari Carel and media scholar Jonathan Sterne discussed the link between early experiments in sound reproduction and contemporary sound culture. Organized and moderated by curator Leah Abir, the conversation examined the relationship between sound and image, art and science, and imagination and technique through the early device known as the phonoautograph. Invented by Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857, the phonoautograph was a sound visualizing machine that generated images of sound vibration. This early audiovisual mechanism was a starting point for Carel’s work Semaphore Island, which uses phonoautograph drawings generated by sound recordings of extinct birds, as well as for Sterne’s book The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, which outlines a comprehensive cultural historiography of sound. The event featured footage of the only functioning phonoautograph in existence today.

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