ISBN: 978-0-9827439-4-2
16,5 x 22 cm (softcover, dust jacket)
296 pages (52 ill. b/w)
Published: May 2012

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( press review )

CHRISTOF MIGONE is an artist, teacher, curator, and writer. He often works with language, voice, bodies, performance, intimacy, complicity, and endurance. He co-edited the books Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2001) and Volumes (Blackwood Gallery, 2015). His writings have been published in Aural Cultures, S:ON, Experimental Sound & Radio, Musicworks, Radio Rethink, Semiotext(e), Angelaki, Esse, Inter, Performance Research, etc. He obtained an MFA from NSCAD in 1996 and a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University in 2007. He has released nine solo audio cds on various labels (Avatar, ND, Alien 8, Locust, Oral). He has curated a number of exhibitions and events: Touch that Dial (1990), Radio Contortions (1991), Rappel (1994), Double Site (1998), stuttermouthface (2002), Disquiet (2005), START (2007), STOP.(2008), and Should I Stay or Should I Go (Nuit Blanche 2010), and numerous others for the Blackwood Gallery between 2008 and 2013. He has performed at Beyond Music Sound Festival (Los Angeles), kaaistudios (Brussels), Resonance FM (London), Nouvelles Scènes (Dijon), On the Air (Innsbruck), Ménagerie de Verre (Paris), Experimental Intermedia (NYC), Méduse (Québec), Images Festival (Toronto), Send+Receive (Winnipeg), Kill Your Timid Notion (Dundee), Liquid Architecture (Melbourne), Mutek, Victoriaville Festival, Oboro, Casa del Popolo, Théâtre La Chapelle, DHCArt, CAFKA, Museum Leuven, Whitney Museum, LUFF, Cave 12, Ftarri, etc. In 2006, the Galerie de l’UQAM in Montreal presented a mid-career survey of his work accompanied by a catalog and a DVD entitled Trou. He is a founding member of Avatar (Québec City). He currently lives in Toronto and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University in London, Ontario.

Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body
Christof Migone

This book delineates a territory of investigation for sound art and its various manifestations through historical, theoretical, polemical and critical analyses of artistic, musical and literary works. In doing so, Migone gives radical definition to an auditory study that includes the complexity of silence and mutism, identity and abjecthood, and language and its stutterances. The recurring site of these stagings is the somatic under all its forms: embodied and disembodied, fragmented and amplified, vocal and mute.

Concrete sites that are investigated include: Antonin Artaud’s writings, Alvin Lucier’s recording I am sitting in a room, Erik Satie’s composition Vexations, Marina Abramovic’s performance Rhythm 0, Adrian Piper’s Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City, Melville’s short story Bartleby, the Scrivener, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson’s documentary film First Contact, and John Cage’s composition 4’33”.