Vortrag: Andy Battentier: "Making the Show Go on: A Sociology of Sound Technicians" (online, 30.11.2021)

Making the Show Go on: A Sociology of Sound Technicians
- A Book Presentation with Andy Battentier

30.11.2021, 18 Uhr
Musik und Gesellschaft im Diskurs , mdw
Online - Anmeldung über torinek[at]mdw.ac.at

Apart from a few noticeable publications, technicians of art worlds, as a social group of its own, have been relatively ignored by social sciences. The works of Howard S. Becker led to generally label them as “support per- sonnel”, implying that their contribution to artistic or cultural production was auxiliary and relatively deprived of autonomy. However, artistic and more generally cultural production tend to be mediated through the recording of sound and image, which generally implies the intervention of one or several technicians handling this procedure. Every movie, every song, every TV commercial or government announcement needs people to place microphone and cameras, to correctly adjust the frame, to mix the various sources of sound, etc. Issued from the PhD thesis of the author, the book that will be presented that evening starts from the assumption that such an omnipresence can only have a significant impact on the way culture is produced, on the way art worlds are organized, and on how meaning and emotions are created. Hence, it constitutes an attempt to study the nature, as well as the practical and sociological aspects of technicians’ contribution within art worlds, by focus- ing on a specific category of technicians: sound engineers in music production. Through in-depth interviews and participant observations, it studies the careers, working practices, and motivations of 29 respondents working among various artistic and cultural fields, and it proceeds to a comparative analysis between French and Dutch fields. It proposes a definition of how technicians can be defined as a specific social group in art worlds, and explores how aesthetics can be related to various forms of hierarchies between technicians and other actors, especially in terms of power to define the meaning of an artistic or cultural object. Finally, it proposes a renewed version of Becker’s description of the mechanisms of cultural and artistic production, which better accounts for their collective nature.

Andy Battentier
After a Bachelor in Drama studies, Andy Battentier worked as a sound technician in music and performing arts. After a couple of years, he engaged in a PhD in Sociology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the University of Milan (Unimi), on the topic of sound technicians. Since grad- uating, he has worked in the fields of cinema and politics.

Registration is mandatory: torinek[at]mdw.ac.at
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