FOCO DE ESCUCHA

Museo del Sonido | 14th Media Art Biennial, Santiago de Chile, 2019.

The idea of the “Fourth World” dates to the 20th century, yet it continues to unfold. It invites us to imagine a world where digital technologies and the natural environment are integrated. Absence and immateriality shift us from a reality where objects define power to one where we communicate through perception and intuition.

Sound, an immaterial material, is especially relevant to the worlds the Fourth World imagines. The Listening Focus turns attention to the ear, and the simple act of listening stands against the visual hegemony that has dominated the post-industrial era. Shared listening offers a common experience of introspection: a single sonic flow in which silence, vibration, and reverberation become materials of coexistence and solidarity with our neighbours.

In music, trumpet player and composer Jon Hassell developed the idea, seeing it as an encounter between ancestral sounds and the possibilities of electronic machines. He described it as:

“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

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).