Gendered Soundings? Sound art & feminism

Visual Culture, by the nature of its very name tends to favour an occularcentric appreciation of contemporary art and culture. Since the 1980s, the term sound art has been used to describe works which merge music and visual art. This has been driven in part by developments in sound reproduction technology as well as experimental composition, interdisciplinary practices and installation formats. Whilst often considered in relation to how it differs from traditional music practices, the development of sound art as a dematerialised practice, shares many parallels with visual art. Rather than think through the fields of music, art and sound separately this course considers each in conjunction with each other. In doing so the course provokes questions about how we read and make contemporary work. Further to this, the course places gendered readings and theories at the centre of its concerns. Female practitioners in the relatively new field of sound art are underrepresented and often ignored in the dominant literature. This course will be motivated by a mobilisation of critical feminist theory to evidence the contribution of women working across the mediums of painting, performance, sound objects and sound montages to the scholarship of visual culture. Credit Level: 10 Year Taken: Year 3 Undergraduate

Not running in 2025/26