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3 - Impulsive Synchronisation: A Conversation on Military Technologies and Audiovisual Arts
- from I - PATTERN RECOGNITION
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- By Aura Satz, Jussi Parikka, Culture and Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.
- Edited by John Beck, University of Westminster, Ryan Bishop, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton
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- Book:
- Cold War Legacies
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 10 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2016, pp 70-82
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- Chapter
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Summary
Aura Satz's technological art engages with mediated realities and historical pasts that are somehow still present. She completed her PhD in 2002 at the Slade School of Fine Art. Satz's work has been featured in various galleries and festivals in the UK and internationally, from FACT (Liverpool) to Tate and Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum to the Barbican as well as ICA, and internationally for example at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Switzerland. In 2014–15 she was a Leverhulme Artist-in- Residence at the University of Southampton (the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, the Department of Music and the John Hansard Gallery) and an artist in residence at Chelsea College of Art, and she also teaches at the Royal College of Art.
Her various installation, audiovisual and performance projects have been able to summon a condition or environment in which one experiences the parallel existence of pasts and presents. Often through historical source work and engaging with past technological ideas, Satz creates poetic imaginaries of technologies, bodies and sonic realities. Indeed, sound technologies are one key theme that runs through a lot of her work, but in a way that engages with the wider vibratory aspects of nature that often become exposed through technological ways of making vibrations and waves visible. She was part of London Science Museum's ‘Oramics to Electronica’ project (2011) on the female inventor Daphne Oram's 1950s synthesiser. Sound visualisation comes out in projects such as Vocal Flame(2012) and the In and Out of Synchfilmic performance (2012). Cultural techniques of synchronisation are exposed in that specific piece and in others, including Joan the Woman – with Voicethat was exhibited in 2013. Her interest in the history of automata is most visible in Automamusic(2008) and Automatic Ensemble(2009), a mixture of old and new automata that engage with surrealist and spiritualist ideas and explorations of automatic writing. Besides the agency of machines, the ‘auto-’ in the automata, Satz however is always meticulously aware of the human body as a vibratory ‘medium’ in itself. This body as medium is always, also, recognised as a gendered one, resulting in her historical excavations into specific moments of media history that result in a poetic and empowering relation to women that is often excluded from many projects and historical narratives.