Douglas Kahn

Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute of Experimental Arts (NIEA), at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He was the Founding Director of Technocultural Studies and is Professor Emeritus in Science and Technology Studies at the University of California, Davis. Kahn is known primarily for his writings on the use of sound in the avant-garde and experimental arts and music. He is the author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts^[1] and co-editor (with Gregory Whitehead) of Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-garde, both published by MIT Press. More recently he has written on naturally occurring electromagnetism in the science and the arts, a topic for which he received a 2006-2007 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Kahn edited Source: Music of the Avant-garde, with the composer and founding editor Larry Austin, for University of California Press - a collection of material drawn from the original Source: Music of the Avant Garde magazine series. His other current projects include a collection, edited with the art historian Hannah Higgins, of essays and documents on the arts and early computing, Mainframe Experimentalism; and a book on the arts deployed across the electromagnetic spectrum, Earth Sound Earth Signal, for University of California Press.^[2]

Kahn created the audiotape cut-up Reagan Speaks for Himself^[3] in 1980 using an interview conducted by Bill Moyers of Ronald Reagan when he was still a candidate for president. The first version was published on a Sub Pop audiocassette and the second version was published on a flexi-disc in RAW magazine. The audiotape was used in a dance mix by the Fine Young Cannibals and sampled by Eric B. & Rakim in their Paid in Full (Coldcut Mix). He appeared in the 1995 film Sonic Outlaws by the San Francisco filmmaker Craig Baldwin.

References

1. ^ "Review by John Potts, 25 July 2002". http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/reviews/rev1002/jpbr14a.html. 
2. ^ "Naturally, electromagnetic". "RealTime issue #94 Dec-Jan 2009/10 pg. 44". http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue94/9668. 
3. ^ "Some Assembly Required". http://www.blog.some-assembly-required.net/2008/06/douglas-kahn.html. 

External links

• douglaskahn.com