Listening focus
Sounds from the Fourth World | 14th Media Art Biennial, Santiago de Chile 2019
Although the idea of the “Fourth World” originates in the 20th century, it still being developed in contingency. This concept allows us to imagine a world where we integrate digital technologies with our natural environment. Absence and immateriality become triggers for the transmutation from a reality where objects define power towards one where we communicate through perception and intuition. Sound –and immaterial material– is specially relevant in the new worlds conceived in the Fourth World. The Listening Focus turns the attention towards the ear, and the sole action of listening stand against the hegemony of the visual that has dominated the post-industrial era. The act of shared listening proposes a common experience of introspection, the sharing of a single sonic flow, the perception of silence, vibration and reverberation as material of coexistence and solidarity to our neighbours.
In music, it wat the trumpet player and composer Jon Hassell who untangled the idea of the Fourth World, understanding it from its beginnings as an encounter between ancestral sounds and the possibilities given by electronic machines. “Possible musics, possible cultures, possible architectures, possible lifestyles, etc. It is an idea that can be reduced to the spectrum of possible relations between individual, tribe and nation in the electric era of masses. Imagine a grid of national frontiers and project over it a non-physical geography based in communication: tribes of people that think alike (…) This balance between native identity and global identity through the multiple electronic extensions is not something that can be imposed or predicted necessarily”1
Crossing the gate that introduces us to the uinverse of possible musics, the Listening Focus is a sound journey with diverse approximations to the notion of Fourth World:
Fourth World
Jon Hassell
Brian Eno
Voice of landscape
Joan La Barbara
Audrey Chen
Sonic heritage
Soundwalk Collective
La Chimuchina
New rituals
Tomoko Sauvage
Baby Vulture
1 (David Toop, Océano de Sonido, 2016, p.210).