In fleeting coherence: navigating spatial and infrastructural conditions through indisciplined sonic performance

Abstract

This thesis demonstrates an exploration of the temporal and spatio-political conditions of sonic performance in and around urban infrastructural environments. Where much so-called politically engaged art making is pragmatically satisfied with ‘playing’ the art system toward accommodation, this work seeks to counter that tendency by foregrounding its own fragilities and temporariness as it is re-lived and re-formulated for each specific, resistant context. Through experimental writing and experiments in the containing architectures of that writing, namely video making; audio recording; incidental annotation; sampling and re-sampling of spoken and unspoken texts, a type of embodied practice research is defined in its ostensive doing and the conditions allowing for that doing. Through each dimension of the work, I explore the possibilities for making transient, performed, aesthetic and often dismissible interventions in urban infrastructure, in a manner which does not shirk the difficulties of working outside the ‘securities’ and ‘rewards’ usually associated with aesthetic activity. The thesis, then, engages with an ongoingness and itinerant siting to investigate the conditions of possibility surrounding making and performance, defining such formulations as trespassic undermaking, where a more-than-legal approach is implemented. In Fleeting Coherence proposes an indisciplined method. By indisciplined, and in contrast to interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary, I mean that the method is one of approaching from a position of sonic performance and maintaining that position. It is in part a rejection of a disciplining or disciplinary thinking. Crucially, the method is not undisciplined, rather, this indisciplinarity is a way to confront and navigate the conditions of a life world as it is, through sonic performance and in a wide range of contexts. Therefore, this body of research explores the action of sonic performance itself as a vehicle for the articulation of research and unproductive cultural production.

Date of Award	Jul 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council
Supervisor	Simon Waters (Supervisor) & Paul Stapleton (Supervisor)