The Rhythmic Event ― Art, Media, and the Sonic

The sonic has come to occupy center stage in the arts and humanities. In the age ofcomputational media, sound and its subcultures can offer more dynamic ways of accounting for bodies,movements, and events. In The Rhythmic Event, Eleni Ikoniadou explores traces andpotentialities prompted by the sonic but leading to contingent and unknowable forces outside theperiphery of sound. She investigates the ways in which recent digital art experiments that mostlyengage with the virtual dimensions of sound suggest alternate modes of perception, temporality, andexperience. Ikoniadou draws on media theory, digital art, and philosophical and technoscientificideas to work toward the articulation of a media philosophy that rethinks the media event asabstract and affective.

The Rhythmic Event seeks to definethe digital media artwork as an assemblage of sensations that outlive the space, time, and bodiesthat constitute and experience it. Ikoniadou proposes that the notion of rhythm--detached, however,from the idea of counting and regularity -- can unlock the imperceptible, aesthetic potentialenveloping the artwork. She speculates that addressing the event on the level of rhythm affords us aglimpse into the nonhuman modalities of thought proper to the digital and hidden in the gaps betweenstrict definitions (e.g., human/sonic/digital) and false dichotomies (e.g., virtual/real). Operatingat the margins of perception, the rhythmic artwork summons an obscure zone of sonic thought, whichconsiders the event according to its power to become.

Eleni Ikoniadou is a Lecturer in Media in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London.