Shock in the Ear by Norie Neumark (1998) with Maria Miranda, Richard Vella, Greg White, and David Bartolo

An experimental new media art designed for a bodily experience of ‘shock’–from culture shock to sensual shock channeled through sounds that ‘goes beyond the interface, into time, into the body, and into imagination’ (ACM SIGGRAPH Archive).

Shock in the Ear integrates interactive stories, performances, music and sounds, and screen interface(s) to invite the user to an intense and poetic experience that challenges the concept of vision-centered interactivity/the hierarchy of vision over sound.

“A sound-centred CDROM, Shock in the Ear  is composed through interactive stories, performances, music and sounds, as well as screens. The invitation for the user is to an intense and poetic experience, through their senses, especially hearing. The work challenges the usual articulation of art and interactivity, with its hierarchy of vision over sound, and solely vision-centred interactivity. The work thus formally expresses the ‘shocking’ concept that sound is the medium most appropriate to interactivity, as a new and engaging artistic form, because sound goes beyond the interface, into time, into the body, and into the imagination and emotions.”

“Shock in the Ear  avoids the slick and controlled look and sound of cyberspace, and explores instead the potential of CDROM for poetic movement, understandings, emotions, and sensations. The sorts of movements and perceptions provoked in the piece are different, disorienting, disrupting to ‘traditional’ CDROM aesthetics and kinaesthetics. The interactivity is slow, contemplative and sensually engaging — a refusal of the usual rapid clicking.”

“Shock in the Ear  engages with the question of how to retrain the ear and the hand in the computer era in the way that cinema retrained the eye in early modernist era — to answer the need thrown up by computer culture to undo the already moribund habits of hand/eye/ear control. The work also addresses the common critique that new media art is non-corporeal. Its strategy is not to represent the body but rather to remember and evoke it — not to display wounds but rather to etch along their kinaesthetic, physical, memory pathways.”

– Read more from Timothy Murray’s curation here

Read student essays on Shock in the Ear:

• “Sensory Dissonance as a Result of Aural Prioritization” by Gabriella Frisch
• “A Shock in the Ear Analysis” by Sano Rogers
• “A Shock in the Ear Analysis” by Ronan Solomon, Kieren Wheeling, and Ana Marks

Credit:

Artist Norie Neumark with: Maria Miranda (visual artist), Richard Vella (music), Greg White (programmer), David Bartolo (interface consultant).

Funding Bodies: Australian Film Commission, Hybrid Arts Fund-Australia Council for the Arts, University of Technology-Sydney

Special Thanks to:

Melanie Swalwell, Cynde Moya, and Patrick Lester for providing access to remote emulators via the Emulation-as-a-Service-Infrastructure (EaaSI).