Blush

This essay navigates a complex of perceptual issues attaching to the aural-archival character of particular commercial architectural spaces. It is designed to articulate the potentially indecidable character of such space which is representative of certain hitherto unexamined features of modern architecture. The motif of intellectual embarassment, realised as a blush here, is intended to highlight a subjective variousness apprehendable in such spaces, and in the process it reimagines and explores the somatic emotional content of architectural environments.
The paper came about in the context of a major conference that I co-organised in Leeds (2004) with Barbara Engh (University of Leeds). This was funded under the auspices of the CentreCATH AHRC project there, with whom I undertook a 3 month Reseach Fellowship. The conference which arose, Aurality, Musicality, Textuality, drew together international scholars and artists from diverse disciplinary backgrounds around a theme of the novel exploration of sound and its relationships to modern culture. Papers from the conference were published in a special issue of the journal parallax, which I co-guest edited.
In revised form the paper also appears in my forthcoming book Auditions: Architecture and Aurality (MIT Press), which is in production and will appear early in 2008. It is representative of the work there. I received a Leverhulme Fellowship for the research on the book. In particular, this essay connects with my essay on the experimental composer Cornelius Cardew, (Mineral Futures' in Watson, G Make Everything New, Bookworks, London, 2006); which, in turn, arose from a fragment of an essay in my book exploring similar motifs of indecidable architectural space in the work of John Cage and Mies van der Rohe.