Shaking it up: sonic warfare and art-making in Okinawa / Aesthetic Pleasures Across Disciplines

This presentation will consider how aesthetic critique may be combined with practices of artistic creation in making sense of the differing significations of US military aircraft noise in Okinawa, Japan. It concerns the aesthetics of Okinawan war art that in a series of recent and on-going research projects I have used as a critical point of reference for thinking about how to design creative practices and outcomes (currently in making a sound map and making sound recordings) that respond to the phenomena of military aircraft noise for affected communities today. Thinking about aircraft noise in aesthetic terms means dealing with the pleasurable and terrifying sensations that ostensibly the same sound stimulates and while I want to make sense of this on the one hand as a discursive problem of representation (tracing a trajectory back to the Futurists) I also want to approach it is a matter of vibration and a question of ontology. My approach is to show how the artistic practices of calibrating and editing media for public presentation can be a way of engaging with the paradoxical affects of aircraft noise as vibration that can be both (terrifyingly) dispersive and (triumphantly) cohesive.