Object-Oriented Sociality: Marina Rosenfeld’s Sound Installation Art

Marina Rosenfeld’s artistic practice is guided by the questions of what (and where) music can or should be. Over the last three decades, the artist and composer has explored these questions through both large-scale performances and intimate multimedia gallery installations, which, as she describes it, are invested in “acoustic architectures and experimental forms of sociality.” This article focuses on Rosenfeld’s gallery installations to consider the ways in which her multimedia work transforms the art gallery into a performative space. By closely attending to the materiality of Rosenfeld’s visual and sonic objects in a recent exhibition, this article explores the manner in which sound-based installation art affords an opportunity to grasp music’s dispersed object-hood as it circulates through and across materials, feelings, and spaces. The author argues that Rosenfeld’s installation practice reveals both music and sonic experience more broadly to be a multimedia, collaborative activity, and affords an opportunity to, in the words of Will Straw, trace the inescapable manner in which sound’s “technologies and assemblages” contribute to its shared social “meaning, affect, and memory.”