ABSTRACT
Audience participation is a strong thread running through much of the sound art practice all the way to its beginnings in the 1950s and 60s, yet it remains underexplored in the sound art discourse. At the same time, the kind of participation inherent to sound art diverges significantly from the ideas of participatory art and relational aesthetics dominating the contemporary art discourse as well. Sound art emphasizes the corporeal and cultural aspects of its medium; thus, the participatory processes it invokes are also media specific and inextricable from the material and structural aspects of the artwork. In this chapter I investigate the connection between mediality and participation in sound art, discussing the kinds of interactions that are made possible by sound artworks and mechanisms by which these interactions are facilitated and communicated to the participants. To do so, I apply the concept of affordance to a select number of artworks classified into three environment types: local, networked and augmented. I argue that the participatory affordances of sound artworks situated in each environment type exhibit certain similarities, showing how material and structural aspects of the artwork facilitate, affect and are affected by participatory processes.
