Unlikely Journal for Creative Arts, a transdisciplinary online journal, opens unexpected spaces for artistic exchange and scholarly conversations across mediums, disciplines, and continents. An experiment in form, each rich media issue explores a theme through live events/exhibitions followed by peer-reviewed publication of creative arts work and scholarly essays.
Issue 6, “Translating Ambiance,” guest-edited by sound artist/scholar Jordan Lacey, plays between the theoretical, political, and aesthetic — through scholarship and creative practices concerned with listening, field-work, and connection with place. The project began with an exhibition where artists made field recordings and translated their embodied experiences for a gallery in inner-city Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. A number of the artists then translated their artworks into published form. Together with other creative practitioners and scholars, they have imagined the possibilities of translating wild ambiances into densely populated cities for the provision of restorative and evocative environments.
Inspired by Jean-Paul Thibaud, whose essay frames the discussion, the issue richly and diversely explores the figure of ambiance, where in-between mediums (light, sound, smells, etc.) and rhythms shape our perceptions and transform the world we perceive. The works and essays featured in “Translating Ambiance” provoke a thinking of ambiance that opens a becoming-world, which is as varied as the flux of mediums through which it is perceived.
With 19 contributors, “Translating Ambiance” poses questions about how the artistic voice can help to rupture the functionalist practices of urban planners in the pursuit of more imaginative and diversely affective cities. How might cities incorporate the sensitivities of artistic exploration and expression — not just through public art objects — but by translating affectivities?
Read Issue 6 of Unlikely Journal for Creative Arts at unlikely.net.au.
Unlikely Publishing’s latest book, Jahnne Pasco-White: Kin, ed. N.A.J. Taylor, is available through co-publisher Art Ink.
Unlikely editor, Norie Neumark, and coordinator, Jan Brueggemeier, invite proposals for guest editing of themed journal issues, books, e-books, and project space works. Get in touch with info@unlikely.net.au to learn more.
