Phonographing Borders: Writing Acoustic Territories in Sinophone Sound Art

Phonographing BordersWriting Acoustic Territories in Sinophone Sound Art Junting Huang (bio) Produced at the height of the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1996, YAO DAJUIN'S "Writing of Sounds of Writing" (1999) commemorates a history in which the proximity of war is materialized in the auditory domain.1 Within its nearly twenty-minute duration, the sound recording features an intercepted phone call between Shanghai and Taipei, between a man and a woman embroiled in an argument about the writing of Chinese characters. Despite the banality of their conversation, what follows takes an unsettling twist. As their argument escalates, the woman's voice is slowly buried in a collage of explosive sounds, inducing a visceral fear. When sound is weaponized as such, there is nowhere to hide. As STEVE GOODMAN reminds us, sonic warfare operates as "an immersive atmosphere or ambience of fear and dread," pervasive yet entrenched in the space in which it reverberates.2 These explosive sounds are not coming from nowhere. They signify, as the artist reminds us, the missile tests fired into Taiwanese waters. From July 1995 to March 1996, a few sets of missile launches, accompanied by live [End Page 61] ammunition exercises, were conducted by the Chinese People's Liberation Army as a response to the cross-strait policy change in Taiwan under Lee Teng-hui's regime. As such, "Writing of Sounds of Writing" has encoded a vicious message and a diplomatic ultimatum—should Lee win Taiwan's first democratic presidential election in 1996, there may very well be a war. By demarcating a militarized zone, the recorded sound has therefore illustrated a contentious border straddling the Taiwan Strait, a border that separates two political entities: the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan). In resisting an ocular-centric thinking in Western philosophy, many scholars of contemporary sound art often take a "medium-specific" approach, emphasizing the raw material attributes of sound in and of itself. Be it Goodman's "ontology of vibrational force" or Christoph Cox's "sonic materialism," their theoretical approaches tend to distinguish sound from other perceptions in order to reveal the most raw and sensuous essence of sound.3 In a departure from discourses on representation and signification, they claim to reveal the "universals concerning the nature of sound, the body, and media."4 Yet as much as "sound art" constitutes a heterogenous field of practices, this fascination with sound-in-itself does not suffice to explicate all sounds in their artistic contexts. As Seth Kim-Cohen proposes, sonic arts should move beyond the perception of materiality and instead focus more on "the textual and inter-textual nature of sound."5 Because the history of sound art has always been so intertwined with conceptualism, argues Kim-Cohen, we should never ignore sound's "expanded situation" and "uncontainable textuality."6 As such, he advocates for a "non-cochlear" sound art, a term that is developed from Marcel Duchamp's "non-retinal" visual art, as Kim-Cohen tries to connect "sonic arts to broader textual, conceptual, social, and political concerns."7 Sound writes. Writing sounds. In Yao Dajuin's work, I am particularly intrigued by how the recorded sound translates the shifting geopolitical boundary into a readable historical text. In problematizing the artistic value of sound-in-itself, such a practice also contests a spaceless bias that has been inherited from the earliest days of media ecology, a spatial bias that is derived from a McLuhanian notion of "acoustic space." Indeed, ever since Marshall McLuhan declared that we are now "living in an acoustic world," we could imagine how physical space has been flattened by the electrical media.8 The telephone, for McLuhan, is "the speech without wall," extending our acoustic sensorium well beyond spatial [End Page 62] boundaries.9 And more than an extension to the auditory perception, the telephone even transforms the space itself into a field of simultaneous information. This is what McLuhan has characterized as the acoustic space—a boundless, directionless, and horizonless world, reverberating with fantasies of instantaneity.10 Yet the problem with a term such as "acoustic space" is that it comes with the promise that the acoustic medium mediates regardless...