ABSTRACT
Kinetic sound sculpture is a mode of practice not easy to categorise or identify clearly. This is partly because, like many other sound-art related practices and even the overarching genre description of ‘sound art’ itself, it is a fusion of traditions, materials and activities which are not easily tied to a specific time period or group of artists (Licht, 2009, p. 3). The field can be seen as benefitting from a range of varied influences from music, art and technology. These include examples of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical automata, early twentieth-century Dadaist and Futurist projects such as Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumori (c. 1913) or Man Ray’s Indestructible Object (1923), custom and sculptural musical instruments such as those made by Harry Parch or the Bashet brothers as well as experimental composition and film making. A further difficulty in identifying the field is that by the time kinetic sound works had become an identifiable mode of practice by a range of practitioners in the mid to late 1960s, critical opinion had begun to favour more conceptual, textural and systems-driven approaches within the arts. This left the world of sounding, moving, object-based sculpture looking decidedly old fashioned, and as a result it has been argued that the field struggled to achieve proper critical representation (see Chau, 2014; Keylin, 2015; Cox 2013; Pigott 2017).
