2. Philips Pavilion: a postcard from Brussels

Decolonial scholar Rolando Vazquez posits the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58Footnote ³ as a paradigmatic origin point of and for twentieth-century modernism (Vazquez Reference Vazquez2020: 45). Following Vazquez, we consider the Philips Pavilion – a gesamtkunstwerk where corporatism and imperialism, architecture and music, sound and space, technology and art came together – as a legendary ancestor of EMPAC. World’s fairs are platforms for countries to display their culture, power, architecture, and technology. In so far as media innovation and imperial propaganda have been understood as intertwined within the framework of the world’s fair (Grau Reference Grau2004: 9), the Philips Pavilion is exemplary. From the Victorian era until the start of the Second World War, world’s fairs promoted a narrative of progress and reinforced the dominance of the ‘centre’ as located in the particular imperial metropoles of London and Paris and in European nations generally. This centre-periphery dynamic was physically represented in Expo 1851 London, also known as the Crystal Palace exhibition, which created a ‘taxonomy of progress’ that was both industrial and racial (Bennett Reference Bennett1996: 87–9, 95).

The imperial world order crystallised by that taxonomy shattered at the end of the Second World War. To borrow the familiar line from Yeats penned at the end of the First World War: the centre cannot hold; this time, rather than mere anarchy, new nations, full of passionate intensity formed throughout the periphery (Yeats Reference Yeats1951: 184). In this broken post-war nadir, the first world’s fair in the Global South was attempted: Expo 1949 Port-au-Prince, ‘The Festival of Peace’ was an example of decolonisation as a ‘metropolitan initiative’, where former colonisers sets the agenda for independence of former colonies (Kirk-Greene Reference Kirk-Greene1982). An expanded port and the growth of Caribbean tourism were focal points of the fair, and many nations – including the entire communist world and most of Asia and Africa – were absent.

Simultaneous with imperial withdrawal from possessions in South and West Asia after 1945, France and the United Kingdom re-asserted their control and exploitation of African colonies, setting the stage for a violent wave of decolonisation exemplified by the struggles for independence in Algeria and Kenya. Anti-imperialism mapped into Cold War alliances defined the world in 1953, when Brussels was chosen as the host city for a world expo to take place in 1958. The Belgian host committee planned a massive festival that would rival Expo 1900 Paris in size and scale. The fair became a venue for Western nations, and one Western corporation, to demonstrate their scientific and technological progress, particularly in response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 (Bureau International des Expositions n.d.).

Known for its light bulbs, radios and other consumer electronics, the Philips Corporation of the Netherlands was at the forefront of the post-war technological boom. In a festival of nations, Philips was the only corporation invited to construct a pavilion for Expo 58. Its contribution, an ‘electronic poem’, was intended to give visitors a glimpse of the future. The Philips Pavilion, designed by composer Iannis Xenakis under architect Le Corbusier, was an asymmetrical concrete structure made of extremely thin cement. The exterior ornament consisted of parallel grooves that evoked wave transmission and interference; the interior provided the maximum amount of space in a freestanding structure (ibid.). Xenakis’s design aimed to minimise echoes and reverberations through curved surfaces. While acoustic isolation has a long history in architecture, the Philips Pavilion marked an exponential leap forward – staging and expanding the clean, dry sound of a recording studio or record shop listening booth for a mass audience.

A historical postcard celebrating Expo 58 shows sharply dressed twentieth-century pedestrians on the fairground’s ‘Europa Allee’, strolling by the modern marvel of the Philips Pavilion. Its angular peaks reach into the sky, dwarfing the nearby Tunisian and Moroccan pavilions. This postcard is reproduced at the opening of the second chapter of Vazquez’s Vistas of Modernity (Reference Vazquez2020). Vazquez’s book-length essay is organised around six twentieth-century postcards – ‘souvenirs of the spectacle of modernity’ (ibid.: 4) – each of which illustrates how the aesthetics of modernity emerges from and upholds the forces of coloniality.Footnote ⁴ Each provides an entry point from which to discuss the world- and empire-building capacities of aesthetic spectacle, and the ways of being and of knowing that it expels. In Vazquez’s analysis, modernist aesthetics and colonial violence are inseparable forces, mutually created, mutually reinforcing.Footnote ⁵ This inseparability echoes sociologist Tony Bennett’s theory of the ‘exhibitionary complex’, which operates through representation and identification, in contrast and in tandem with the carceral complex, which operates through discipline and control (Bennett Reference Bennett1996: 87–9). Identification, as much as punishment, works to mould modern subjectivity, placing bodies into self-identified positions within industrial society. Le Corbusier unwittingly described how this exhibitionary complex might work in his proposal for the Philips Pavilion: ‘the ambience surrounds the visitors imprinting on them psycho-physiological sensations’. The audience’s senses would be ‘full, nourished, satiated’, with no room for anything outside of the spectacle of the pavilion (Le Corbusier cited in Petit Reference Petit1958). Vazquez calls this double-movement of subject-formation and erasure at work in the Philips Pavilion ‘the coupling of representation and perception’ (Vazquez Reference Vazquez2020: 45–6). In the pavilion, what is represented is all that there is. Awareness of other bodies, of other beings, and of the body of the earth, is minimised – overwhelmed by sensory onslaught and precluded by acoustic isolation and sound dampening.

3. Poème électronique: abstraction and immersion

Within the Philips Pavilion, visitors were immersed in Edgar Varèse’s Poème électronique – an 8-minute spatialised musical composition synchronised to a film by Le Corbusier. Merging, transposing and transforming sounds of melodic and percussion instruments, electronic tone generators, machine noise and voices, Poème électronique was a landmark of electronic music. The movement of each new group of visitors entering and exiting the Pavilion was accompanied by the sounds of Xenakis’s Concret PH, a 2-minute composition made from the manipulated sounds of smouldering charcoal. Both compositions were created through the techniques of musique concrète, a situated lineage of technical experimentation and musical composition that emerged after the Second World War in response to new possibilities for recording and transforming ‘real’ or ‘concrete’ sounds. Pierre Schaeffer, a founder of the genre, used the term ‘reduced’ to describe the mode of listening it required, one of attending to a sound with ‘intention to perceive the object for itself’ rather than for its cause, content, or meaning (Schaeffer [Reference Schaeffer, North, Dack and Oakland1966] 2017: 114). As sound artists ourselves, we are indebted to Schaeffer and the early experimenters of tape music. We also recognise musique concrète as modernist precisely in its method: as described by Schaeffer, reduced listening aims to expel awareness of a sound’s cultural or historical embeddedness and association (ibid.: 213). This detachment from contexts is the precondition of modernist abstraction, separation and control.

Following from Vazquez, we understand aesthetic abstraction as reinforcing the epistemic abstraction that undergirds colonial ways of being and doing. Abstraction promises to hide complexity and in so doing to clarify. In actuality, abstraction always hides real life, hides violence, labour and emotions.Footnote ⁶ Colonialism was established – and continues to be maintained – through violence: the function of abstraction is to obscure this violence. Black scholarship has pointed to the role of abstraction in the development of colonial systems of slavery, as human beings were reduced to measurable and fungible units (Hartman Reference Hartman1997; Sharpe Reference Sharpe2016), what has been termed a ‘founding abstraction of whiteness’ (Winnubst Reference Winnubst, Thiele, Kaiser and O’Leary2021: 165). This historical backdrop informs our argument about the politics of sonic abstraction and the spaces created for its reception.

These spaces are isolated, but not empty; rather, they are emptied of the world so they may be refilled with precision. In the Philips Pavilion, a team of projectionists distributed the tape recordings of Poème électronique and Concret PH through 11 audio channels to an estimated 300–400 loudspeakers (Ouzounian Reference Ouzounian and Born2013). This massive speaker system marked a giant leap for spatial audio, indicating possibilities for immersive spatial sound environments where the composer could precisely control the position and convincingly simulate the movement of amplified sound. Sound scholar Budhaditya Chattopadhyay suggests critical examination of such immersive environments that construct a ‘fantasyland where the real is always hidden in order to create pleasure’ (Reference Vazquez2020: par. 6). This is what Vazquez has described as ‘the choreography of the life experience of the subject qua spectator’, where what is represented is all that there is. We are enclosed in a new reality, in a simulation whose increasing resolution expels our own dreams and sensations. Alongside abstraction and reduced listening, immersion here functions as another kind of separation via full sensory occupation. This convergence of abstraction, separation, and immersion allows for the dissociation from, the disavowal of, what lies beneath, such as the militarism that undergirds the technological progress celebrated at Expo 58 (Rodgers Reference Rodgers2010; Ouzounian Reference Ouzounian2020: 37–60).

Musique concrète – its aesthetics and its techniques – produced the works installed in the Philips Pavilion and played a role in the lineage of sonic arts that buildings such as EMPAC were constructed to showcase. It in no way, however, represents the epitome of sonic abstraction. Musique concrète would, in time, be superseded by compositional approaches on either side of a spectrum of abstraction: with phonography and soundscape composition on the one end, and electroacoustic and electronic music on the other. Schaeffer had himself disavowed the term by the late 1960s for what he articulated as its misperceived elevation of the (mundane) ‘concrete’ over the (exalted) ‘abstract’ ([Reference Schaeffer, North, Dack and Oakland1966] 2017: 7). In an essay on constructions of gender in electroacoustic music, artist and researcher Andra McCartney argues that musique concrète was marginalised over the latter half of the twentieth century because it was not, in fact, controlled, abstract, or pure enough. Pierre Boulez, who initially worked with Schaeffer, dismissed musique concrète as ‘formless’ and ‘primordial’ (McCartney Reference McCartney2006), insisting that composers must control their materials. This principle would inform Boulez’s vision for another ancestor of EMPAC, the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (IRCAM) which he would go on to found.

4. Politics of space: from Philips to EMPAC

The Philips Pavilion may appear to be provisional architecture – it was a temporary building constructed for a temporary festival (Sterken Reference Sterken2022); however, fundamentally, it is a proposition, or prototype, for future buildings. Considering the Philips Pavilion as a prototype, we draw a dotted line connected by leaps and inferences that follows the Philips Pavilion through IRCAM to EMPAC. Choosing this route leaves out other lineages: the concert hall diffusion techniques of the electroacoustic music community, the flexible space tradition of the ‘black box’ theatre, the cable wrangling of 1990s experimental media art spaces, and – returning to Expo 58 – the magic lantern show at the Czechoslovakia Pavilion. EMPAC is a product of all of these influences. However, its most prominent predecessor is the Institute for Music and Acoustics at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (IMA-ZKM), established by EMPAC’s founding director Johannes Goebel in 1990 (Institute for Music and Acoustics n.d.).

In her ethnography of IRCAM, anthropologist Georgina Born points out that it ‘cannot be understood in isolation from the aesthetic and philosophical traditions that inform it’ (Born Reference Born1995: 40). In fact, none of the buildings in this lineage can. The Philips Pavilion, IRCAM, IMA-ZKM and EMPAC share cultural and architectural features: they are all freestanding buildings in which advanced acoustic isolation facilitates very precise sound recording and simulations. They all emphasise art-science collaboration in general with music-technology research at the apex. IRCAM, founded by Boulez in 1977, would inaugurate this tradition of a research centre for art and science. In 1992, Johannes Goebel wrote the following about the new Institute for Music and Acoustics at ZKM; his description could just as easily be applied to IRCAM or EMPAC:

In 2001, Goebel was hired as a consultant for EMPAC. Soon after, he was named EMPAC’s founding executive director (EMPAC n.d.a). He led a team of architects, consultants and engineers to realise the programmatic vision of EMPAC, which focused on bridging human perception with the digital domain. Goebel also led the design and construction of the 220,000-square-foot research and performance complex, a highly flexible technical infrastructure with multiple studios, a theatre and EMPAC’s signature: the concert hall that ‘rests on its own structure, isolated from the rest of the building’ (Belanger Reference Belanger2016). While the concept of a ‘room within a room’ or an auditorium that is isolated from its surrounding building has been with us since ancient times, these buildings all represent major advancements in sound isolation. As articulated on the EMPAC website: ‘An extraordinary baseline of quiet has been achieved through acoustic separation – literally a space between the walls and floors of each venue – to prevent conduction of noisy vibrations. To further cushion vibrations, parts of the building sit on springs embedded in the foundation’ (EMPAC n.d.b). The presentation spaces are separated from the earth and its troublesome noise, floating ‘in defiance of gravity’ (Adams et al. Reference Adams, Brooks and Ghouse2023: 10). This creates an environment of remarkable acoustic clarity. It also makes for a wonderful studio for artists in residence, free from auditory distractions and with full control of the space to facilitate an artist’s vision. There is, however, a cost to this radical isolation.

‘White aurality’ is a term proposed by sound scholar Marie Thompson to name a sonic aesthetic that disavows the situated perception of the listener. This force, or ideology, ‘amplifies the materiality of “sound itself” while muffling it sociability; it amplifies Eurological sound art and, in the process, muffles other sonic practices’ (Thompson Reference Thompson2017: 273–4). Listening through the filter of Thomson’s ‘white aurality’ helps us to hear how the environment of EMPAC amplifies experiences such as sound and light at the threshold of perceptibility, while muting context, connection, and relation – all the while invisibilising its own presence as a cultural mediator. Thompson’s critique aligns with broader decolonial scholarship, which emphasises the non-neutrality of technological and architectural structures within settler-colonial contexts. Just as colonial systems have sought to control land, bodies and knowledge, spaces such as EMPAC can be understood as enclosures that limit what can be heard and experienced.

Whether in spite of, or in response to, this underlying culture, decolonial and anti-racist thinking is no longer marginalised in academic and artistic communities. Brooks and Ghouse’s thoughtful curation is a testament to that. However, when works with decolonial intent are presented at EMPAC, or in spaces that share its aural inheritances, they encounter limitations imposed by the architecture itself, considered broadly and deeply not only as volumes but also as systems, surfaces and programs. The very isolation that allows for heightened listening experiences indoors also risks muting artworks that point to the land, bodies and social contexts outside of it. EMPAC is a bubble, built from wood, glass and steel, that embodies a fantasy, a colonial fantasy, of control and independence. Eliminating noise also forecloses its metaphors and materialities – the unplanned, the resistant and the more-than-human.

5. Shifting centre

‘All artwork in the exhibition, including the sculpture, is deemed time-based’, reads the guidebook to Shifting Center (Adams et al. Reference Adams, Brooks and Ghouse2023: 16). Occupying all the spaces of EMPAC for two weeks, Shifting Center offered visitors a variety of immersive listening experiences. However, ‘all works are not playing simultaneously’ (ibid.: 15), meaning a visitor with less than four hours could not experience the exhibition in its entirety. Like many visitors, we attended the show several times for less than an hour, engaging with different works each time, and revisiting some pieces on multiple occasions.

Because each venue was carefully arranged into 30-minute or 60-minute sequences, the exhibition encouraged two visitor approaches: the informed and the oblivious. The oblivious visitor would enter the building and wander from room to room, encountering whichever artwork was active at that moment, seeing and hearing whatever grabbed their attention. In contrast, the informed visitor would consult the guidebook, using its maps to orient themselves and understand ‘what is taking place in each space’ (Adams et al. Reference Adams, Brooks and Ghouse2023: 16). We visited the exhibition in both ways – oblivious on opening night, and more purposefully with the guidebook in hand during subsequent visits. Each approach shaped our experiences as viewers and listeners.

In all our visits, we began and ended in the concert hall. The largest presentation space at EMPAC, the concert hall is generally closed, locked away from breath and footsteps. El Salvadoran artist Beatriz Cortez’s Ilopango, The Volcano That Left, the 12′ steel sculpture that served as the exhibition’s emblem, was installed in the concert hall. The informed visitor might wait for some type of eruption, alluded to in the guidebook, the photogenic volcano dwarfed by the massive concert hall with its 60′ high ceilings. An acousmatic soundscape by Egyptian artist Nancy Mounir filled the room. Currents of air softly moved through Indigenous (Three Affiliated Tribes Nation) artist Cannupa Hanska Luger’s clay flutes, which were formed in the shapes of the skulls of a fox, ocelot, vulture, armadillo and turtle. Every 15 minutes, two of the flutes were amplified, filling the hall with a reverberant drone.Footnote ⁷ When the flute faded away, the ambisonic sound installation resumed.

While Hanska Luger’s flutes are imaginative works, or Future Ancestral Technologies as he calls them, Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin’s installation in Studio 1 restored ancient technologies – bringing archaeological artefacts back to life. Tossin, a repeat resident at EMPAC for several years, fabricated highly accurate reproductions of pre-Columbian wind instruments. Each Absent Breath (2023), a collaboration between Tossin and Brazilian composer Michelle Agnes Magalhães, used wave field synthesisFootnote ⁸ to create a multidimensional soundscape from studio recordings of the instruments. Her sculptural reproductions were silently placed in bleacher seating, inviting audience members to sit among them. In the same darkened space, a monumental screen showed documentation of Mexican artist Tania Candiani’s Concert One: For the Animals. We could see and hear the artist performing a concert ‘for the animals’ of the Sonoran Desert. The concert used the desert rocks as ‘input sources that created a pulsating tapping on the rock’s surface’ via a custom designed interface (Candiani Reference Candianin.d.). The gesture was poetic; however, we were not transported to the desert, nor brought into an experience of the resonance of the rocks. A collection of locally gathered rocks formed a pile in the corner of the room. Their resonance was periodically sounded by the tapping of the custom interface, now experienced in person. In the black box studio space, however, the gesture felt like a technical demonstration.

In Studio 2, a television greeted us in the vestibule, featuring footage of the Indonesian artist Julian Abraham ‘Togar’ recording the sea with a boom microphone. To an oblivious visitor, this footage would appear silent. The informed visitor would know that the sound had been displaced to the atriums of EMPAC. Still, the recording of the water was lost and underwhelming in EMPAC’s sleek and cavernous hallways and stairs. Inside Studio 2, three works by Colombian-Korean-American artist Gala Porras-Kim were displayed, dominated by the polyurethane monuments of Proposal for the Reconstituting of Ritual Elements of the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan (2019). An informed visitor would find the documents that gave meaning to the work – an appeal to a modern museum to return these massive ritual objects to their original locations and replace them with the artist’s replicas. This appeal for the rematriation of objects – the most explicitly anti-colonial gesture in the show – spoke directly to the colonial legacies embedded in museum practices. At the same time, as originally designed, the shifting angle of the sun through a gallery’s windows would move the shadow of the monument around the space – allowing elements of the earth to shape the piece. None of the presentation venues at EMPAC have any such connection to the outside world. In this windowless room, the arc of the movement of the sun was recreated by an automated lighting rig, removing any sense of connection to the cycles of the earth.

The exhibition critically examined site-specificity and dislocation. As the guidebook notes: ‘how objects, artworks, and cultural belongings are taken from their context and often silenced through museological mechanisms of preservation and display’ (Adams et al. Reference Adams, Brooks and Ghouse2023: 4). The guidebook further noted how ‘architectural acoustics impact exhibitions as resonant spaces of situated listening’. While EMPAC is not a museum, the architectural acoustics at EMPAC did indeed affect the exhibition. As much as the technologies of EMPAC were able to amplify, spatialise and create the quietest possible backdrop for the works of Shifting Center, they also dampened any decolonial power they may have had to lead audiences towards a ‘listening otherwise’.

While the content of the artworks engaged powerfully with decolonial approaches to history, sound, land and displacement, these themes were undermined by the very spaces meant to showcase them. Even the guidebook appeared to work against itself. Printed in low-contrast type (faint purple on white), the text was difficult to read in the dim light of the exhibition spaces, making it hard for visitors to be ‘informed’ (Vera Institute 2017). This design choice created a barrier, whether intended or not, forcing us to read the guidebook at home rather than in the gallery. The content of the words was evacuated by the minimalist form of the guidebook design – unintentionally exemplary of the ways in which the aesthetics of abstraction absorb and neutralise decolonial intent.

In contradistinction, the piece that we heard as most successful in this exhibition was Micah Silver’s Weather in a Lagrangian Sky (2023); it was successful precisely because it did not seek the ground of land and peoples and histories beyond the technosphere of EMPAC. Rather, it was deeply situated in the technological and creative histories of which the building is a part. Silver’s piece was created in collaboration with an audio system designed in situ by the esoteric, groundbreaking composer Maryanne Amacher just before her death in 2009 (EMPAC n.d.c). As EMPAC’s founding music curator (2006–10), Silver had invited Amacher to be an artist-in-residence. She worked over the course of two years in EMPAC, crafting an idiosyncratic arrangement of loudspeakers and subwoofers, many of which were hidden in rooms outside the theatre, or under its seats. Building from Amacher’s speaker system, Weather in a Lagrangian Sky used sound to evoke natural and cosmic phenomena, shaking the ears and seats of audience members, and weaving an otherworldly spell of whispers, explosions and Amacher’s own voice.

While the piece was powerful in its affective impact and impressive in its technological execution, it was somewhat disconnected from the broader thematic concerns of the exhibition, its abstract soundscape at odds with the political and cultural struggle implicit or explicit in the other works. It is possible that our reading of the show is superficial, and we were drawn into Silver’s work because it is what we recognised, what we have been trained in. We are also part of this tradition.

6. Conclusion: eruption and escape

Shifting Center played with space, transgressed expected boundaries and pointed to the importance of land, place and interconnection. We were excited to experience such rooted and vital art work, but also struck by a disjunction: works that speak to the Earth presented in rooms completely closed off from the world. This experience of neutralisation was deflating. In this article, we have attempted to come to terms with how the architectural acoustics of EMPAC may have shaped our sensations. Our critique has taken us through the aesthetics of modernity, the violence of abstraction and how the mode of reduced listening has shaped the built environments that have emerged to support it.

Is it possible to ‘hear otherwise’ from the ‘present-absence’ of white aurality at EMPAC? We are both connected, personally and professionally, to this building. We are grateful that this space exists; EMPAC’s interdisciplinary approach, technical resources and devotion to artists is far too rare in the United States. At EMPAC, we have listened to delicious abstractions, enchanting stories and fantastic music: Laurie Anderson telling us about her works-in-progress; Natasha Barrett sweeping massive sound objects through and around the enormous concert hall; Francisco Lopez showering us with virtual rain, frogs, insects. And yet…

Something about the deep quiet of EMPAC has always left a nagging feeling, a dislocation that grips the audience in the building and follows it out the door. When dislocation was made the theme for a show, this sensation finally came into focus. It is no accident that this coincided with an exhibition that brought many artists from the margin to the centre. In revealing the limits of what is currently possible in spaces such as EMPAC, Shifting Center has helped us to listen for alternate auralities. We heard a whisper of one in the sound of Amacher’s voice as it emerged from the darkness of EMPAC’s theatre like a ghost. Cortez’s volcano, previously installed at Storm King Art Center, spent two weeks travelling on the Hudson River from Kingston – Amacher’s longtime home – to Troy. We dreamt that Amacher’s ghost hitched a ride on the back of the steel volcano. EMPAC’s acoustic isolation can keep out vibrations, but it cannot keep out ghosts.