Haunted Sound: Nothingness,Movement,and the Minimalist Imagination

Abstract

This paper explores the topic of ‘haunted sound’ and its overarching significance within minimalist thought, tracing the vast intricacies of this aerial intimation as a new and unforeseen existential horizon. To this end, the paper advances via the entangling concepts of nothingness and movement, including subthematic dimensions as far-reaching as: the zero-degree, disintegration, control/noncontrol, mood, catastrophe, indeterminacy, interruption, repetition, desertion, indifference, stillness, and exhaustion. It is through the formulation of this haunted soundscape, in turn, that the once absolute totalities of consciousness stray toward an increasingly apparitional province, turning perception itself toward the paradoxical borderlands of presence and absence, materiality and immateriality, being and nonbeing. Ultimately, the intent of this project is to devise an innovative outlook on the singular potential of sound to eclipse past existential regimes, to lead the aesthetic toward a vanishing, phantasmatic sphere at once creative and destructive, ethereal yet incisive, and which thereby restores the artwork to its volatile capacity for engaging the chaos of a minimalist imagination.