The Art of Resonance – The Resonance of Art

Originating from the Latin notion of resonantia, which literally translates as echo or re-sounding, resonance is commonly used in physics to describe a response of an object or a system to an action by a transfer of energy. In acoustics, it is the augmentation of sound by reverberation when soundwaves from any source reflect off other surfaces in space.

From physics to arts, resonance takes on multiple modes of differentiated response, only possible by way of gaps and encounter: resonance as activation of sensory exchange; resonance as mobilization of reflective capacity; resonance as transmission of feeling, thought, senses, and memory; resonance as a form of social relationality and aesthetic-political engagement; resonance as an exchange between the aesthetic and the rational, between art and thought, between practice and theory; resonance as relations between sense, sensation and signification, between perception and interpretation, between manifestation and representation, between mediation and context. Moving between and beyond genres, media, disciplines, politics, and affects, resonance is constant tessellation and oscillation.

How can we think with and alongside the idea of resonance as both a theory and practice of aesthetics and politics? If we consider resonance as differentiated response rather than repeated echo, how can it assist us in our search for new modes of interaction, formation and transformation? How can it help us to tune into unacknowledged affinities and solidarities, communalities and commonalities, and challenge dominant orders and orderings of sense and sense-making? How can the idea of resonance be explored as a principle and method, as a practice and praxis that defy norms of representationalism and ocularcentrism? How can this exploration expand our common notions and limits of time and space, subject and object, experience and expression, translation and collaboration? How does resonance move, how can it make us move and moved?