This is a project here in DC that will kick in tomorrow:

Perhaps the only place where one sits alone in quiet expectancy is in a bathroom. So what better locale is there for blocking out the external and experiencing artists who use sound as their medium than a quiet cubicle that originally was designed and built as a portable toilet? That is the premise of "Found Sound," a citywide exhibit featuring nine sound artists.

Here's a PDF of the full info. It's a nice follow-up to the Visual Music exhibition that just closed at the Hirschhorn. Coincidentally, there's a piece in the current Artforum by Christoph Cox on the coincidence of exhibitions on the theme of synaesthesia. A passage that raised a red flag for me:

Developments in contemporary technology also promote the idea of synaesthesia. Brain-imaging technologies used to explore the phenomenon are, paradoxically enough, themselves synaesthetic in their psychedelic visual representation of nonvisual sensory phenomena. This quality points to the more general fact that digital technologies offer, if not a union of the senses, then something akin: the intertranslatability of media, the ability to render sound as image, and vice versa. As Friedrich Kittler, who has written extensively on communication technology, puts it: "The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. . . . Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound, or voice. And once optical fiber networks turn formerly distinct data flows into a standardized series of digitized numbers, any medium can be translated into any other."

While the use of the term 'translation' may be technically correct [though 'intertranslatability'? C'mon, he's makin' that shit up], I think a better choice would have been 'transformation.' This may seem like a quibble, but I think there's an important distinction to be drawn: translation, at least in literature, suggests moving from one form to another while retaining meaning. 'Frere' and 'brother' mean roughly the same thing. Niether a visual respresentation of a fourier analysis of the word 'brother' nor an MRI of my brain as I consider the concept 'brother' is equivalant in meaning - these are arbitrary transformations. Whatever meaning these representations might contain are bound to the nature of the transformation and to the formal properties of the output, with only mild, associative connections with the input. While Cox doesn't directly address 'meaning' he does come back around to it:

As Kittler notes, the ready translatability of digital media encourages this literalness. The fact that all digital material shares a common base—binary code—supports the illusion that sound, image, word, and movement can be made identical and interchangeable. What is forgotten is that they can be made so only via the intermediary of arbitrary mapping formuli decided in advance.

Anyway, check out the Cox article, it's a rewarding read. While I'm thinking of it: missing from Visual Music are stills/cells from Fantasia, or for that matter any of a number of musicals - anything by Busby Berkey, or The Band Wagon, or The Wall - or MTV videos. All of these, especially MTV [which, in its heyday, lifted liberally from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, which in turn lifted liberally from Orson Welles' The Trial, which...], have had a profound impact on visual culture in the 20th century. Cox's article mentions a number of other omissions including Blue by Derek Jarman. Perhaps the notion of synaesthesia is low-hanging fruit for curators?