This book fell this morning on my door mat.  It contains great essays by Michael Schwab, Jonathan Impett, Juan Parra, Mieko Kanno and many others … and one by me too: “Artistic Research and Sound Art in Public Urban Spaces.”

From the article: “It is the aim of this chapter to expand and examine in more detail how artistic research and sound art relate to one another. To do so, I will concentrate on several existing sound art works, all situated in public urban spaces. The main reason for this demarcation is that working on and with public urban spaces often requires more “research” from the sound artist than producing a so-called autonomous, non-site-specific art work. I will try to answer questions such as: How do sound artists contribute towards developments in the arts as well as knowledge production? Which spaces of research and which methodological tools do they use? Which new concepts have they developed? It is my hope that this chapter will show that artistic research and sound studies—both still marginal (and marginalised) in current academic fields—contribute in significant and unique ways towards rethinking our being-in-and-with-the-world.”

In what follows I pay attention to Max Neuhaus, Peter Cusack, Edwin van der Heide, and Asa Stjerna, and connect their work to micropolitics and sonic materialism.