Discipline, Liquid Architecture and Gertrude Contemporary are pleased to present the third public lecture in the 2015 series ‘Histories and Theories of Sound’.

Amelia Barikin. ‘Sound Fossils and Arche-Fossils: Towards a Mineral Ontology of Contemporary Art.’

As a material index of acoustic activity, the term ‘sound fossil’ has gained currency in the fields of paleosonics and contemporary art both as a means of accounting for the appearance of the past in the present, and as an embodiment of cosmic time. Drawing upon audible and not so audible projects by a variety of artists including Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson, Pierre Huyghe and Laurent Grasso, this enquiry begins with Roger Callois’ musings on the writing of stones, detours through the accidental discovery of the the sonic record of the Big Bang in New Jersey in 1964, and culminates in a consideration of the relationship between sound fossils and ‘arche-fossils’ (Meillassoux) to sketch out the significance of mineral ontologies to contemporary artistic production.

BIOGRAPHY: Amelia Barikin is a contemporary art historian currently living in Brisbane, Australia. Her current research interests include time travel, contemporary art, science fiction, historiography, speculative paleontology, chronophobia,  material animism, non-sites, and philosophies of time. She has worked as a writer and curator on numerous exhibitions and arts projects both independently and with broader cultural organisations, most recently with TarraWarra Museum of Art as co-curator of Pierre Huyghe: TarraWarra International 2015 with Victoria Lynn, and has published extensively. Her book ‘Parallel Presents: The Art of Pierre Huyghe‘ was published by MIT Press in 2012, her anthology ‘Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction‘, co-edited with Helen Hughes, was published by Surpllus in 2013. She is currently researching the relation between art and science fiction as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Art History at the University of Queensland, where she also teaches.

Image Caption:

Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson, ‘Making a Record (Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald), 2009 – 2014 (detail). Audio interviews, electroplated records, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, 22k gold, and texts contributed by an actress, an artist, a curator, a geologist, a hypnotist, a psychoanalyst, a singer and a writer after contact with the objects.