Joe Banks, 'Rorschach Audio', Histories and Theories of Sound, Lecture #5 2015

Liquid Architecture and the Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA are pleased to present British sound artist and writer Joe Banks in Australia for the first time. On Wednesday June 3 at 6.30pm at Gertrude Contemporary, Banks will deliver a lecture titled 'Rorschach Audio' as part of the ‘Histories and Theories of Sound’ series presented in association with Gertrude Contemporary, Liquid Architecture and Discipline. Banks's lecture is #5 in the 'Histories and Theories of Sound' series that began last year, and has featured lectures by Branden W. Joseph, David Grubbs, Douglas Kahn, and James Parker.

Blurb:
In Rorschach Audio: Art and Illusion for Sound, Banks offers a critical account of Spiritualistic and allegedly supernatural Electronic Voice Phenomena (ghost­voice) recordings, tracing the uncanny phenomena back through the histories of art, literature and the little-known audio monitoring work by U.K. wartime intelligence agencies. Banks argues that ‘the earliest form of sound recording technology was not a machine but was written language,’ illustrating the argument via a series of fascinating and bizarre psychoacoustic illusions.

Respondent:
Ceri Hann (RMIT)

Biography:
Emerging in London in the mid 1990s, Disinformation pioneered creative uses of electromagnetic (radio) noise radiated by live mains electricity, lightning, magnetic storms, high­voltage plasma discharges, industrial, IT and laboratory hardware, railway and metro systems, and the sun. From the beginning, Disinformation’s imagery was strongly driven by research into fields including military research and development, space physics, and psychology of perception and illusion. While other young artists were subscribing to Artforum, Joe was devouring journals on defence electronics and communications psychology. In 2012 he published the book Rorschach Audio: Art and Illusion for Sound exploring the relation between techniques of recording and mechanisms of perception, through figures as diverse as parapsychologist Konstantīns Raudive, artist Jean Cocteau, and the art historian and wartime intelligence eavesdropper E.H. Gombrich. Joe lives in London, near the set of traffic lights which inspired physicist Leo Szilard to conceive the theory of the thermonuclear chain reaction.

Media release available here.