Alyce Santoro - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

By cultivating practices that allow for engaged, active looking and listening, the notion of objectivity can be explored—is the observer ever truly separate from that which is being observed? Using field recording, invented frameworks for improvised music, collage (both sonic and visual), drawing, and writing, the dynamic/dialectic between the looker and the seen, and the listener and the heard, can be examined.

With an early background in biology and scientific illustration, I set out with a straightforward goal: To make visible the invisible wonders of science and nature. Shortly, however, upon encountering overlaps and paradoxes inherent in accepted—if sometimes seemingly divergent—approaches to art "versus" science, I became focused on the cultural phenomena that cause these fields to be viewed as separate, and the ways that social imaginaries form and can shift.

In the 1990s I coined the word philosoprops to describe multi-media works intended to raise a question, illustrate a concept, catalyze an action, challenge perception, or spark a dialog. Philosoprops offer subtle, often playful critiques of the foibles of highly literal, positivist, hierarchical, anthropocentric, reductionist thinking.

Much of my recent work is concerned with sonic and visual challenges to prevailing "logics," and the devising of frameworks for improvisation and collaboration.

In December 2019 I received an MA in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies from Rhode Island School of Design. My research compared the shared desire of some 18th/19th century Romantic Naturalists, 20th century Surrealists, and 21st century thinkers to defy destructive conceptions of "progress" by “re-enchanting the world.” I suggest this spirit is urgently needed now in light of the Anthropocene epoch. My thesis An Intricate Ensemble: The Art-Science of an Ecological Imaginary for the Anthropocene Epoch is available at RISD Digital Commons.

My visual and sound pieces have appeared in over 50 exhibitions internationally related to innovative textiles; experimental musical scores; sound and listening; and social action and ecology. My written works have appeared in Leonardo Music Journal, the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts Journal, Antennae, Waging Nonviolence, and Truth-out. In 2015 I self-published Philosoprops: A Unified Field Guide, a catalog of my work/exegesis on the ways that thought—and the phenomena that spark it—shapes culture.

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