Cracked Media Leonardo Reviews Ottobre

Cracked Media - The Sound of Malfunction

by Caleb Kelly
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2009
392 pp., illus. 20 b/w. Trade, $24.95
ISBN: 978-0262-01314-7.

Reviewed by Giuseppe Pennisi
Professor of Economics Università Europea di Roma
Rome, Italy

giuseppe.pennisi@gmail.com



Why should a professional economist be interested in nearly 400 pages study on cracks and noise? There are two reasons: a) this economist has always been keenly interested in music and in recorded music (he still reads from time to time John Culshaw “Ring Resounding”, a marvelous account of the first stereo recording of Wagner’s “Ring” under Sir Georg Solti’s baton); b) also in the last few years this economist has been a student and a scholar of information economics––both economic theory of information and its application to the media sector. Background noise and cracks were detested by Culshaw but are pillar of information economics. Caleb Kelly, a lecturer at the Sidney College of Arts, is neither a sound technician (like the late John Culshaw) nor an economist. His research is based in the sound arts, specifically as it relates to art and music.

This is first book, largely based on his Ph. D. dissertation, focuses on the use of cracked playback devices (turntables and CD players) to produce new work and sounds for art and music practices in the last century. He has written for numerous art publications. Now Kelly is editing an anthology entitled Sound for the Documents in Contemporary Art series published by Whitechapel Gallery in London and The MIT Press. In parallel Kelly has produced numerous experimental music festivals and sound events with national festival, “What is Music?” and his own impermanent.audio nights, the latter running for six years. In addition he has curated exhibitions at Artspace, Performance Space, Pelt (a gallery project he directed) and most recently ICAN.

Kelly is, no doubt, a merit; he knows how to write well and interest his reader. I know very little of the technological part of live electronics and other devices discussed in the 400 pages of his book. Yet, I read the book in about a week and became keenly aware of the importance of “cracks and breaks” for us all and was intrigued by his assertion whereby “cracked media” can be seen as a precursor of “modern media” (very broadly defined) as well as by the justification he provides. Kelly adds also some vivid considerations. “New media has the core ability to transform digital codes into new objects”. As a consequence, we are no longer in “the logic of industrial mass society,” shaped by the belief that everyone should experience life in an equal and democratic manner in a clean environment. Instead, “at the turn of the twenty-first century numerous web-and e-mailed-based projects were initiated that filled cleaned digital environment with noise”. This has implications not only for the arts––first of all for music––but also for information economics.

As information economics evolved in the last 30 years of the twentieth century and was crowned by the 2001 Nobel Prize to his founding fathers, the main focus of the discipline was how to identify “noise” and prevent “noise” from distorting information and creating asymmetries. Kelly provides an interesting point: “noise” weights and is noble. Worth investigating further from several disciplinary viewpoints.