Curating sound performance as laboratories of envisioning

This paper is based on my dissertation research that investigates how sound performance can be presented and represented - in real time, as well as in and through the archive. This double perspective opens a field of curatorial problems related to the simultaneous movements of both envisioning and documenting, when curating within the context of the art museum.
Acknowledging that performance and sound art has entered the ecologies (and economies) of museum institutions, I explore the conference theme from the perspective of on-going experiments with laboratory-based approaches to curating that highlight possible discontinuities and convergences between experimental curatorial/artistic practices and institutional needs of museums to communicate, document and archive.
I have adopted the laboratory metaphor for a series of activities that serve to hybridise a rethinking of these conventional issues in a practical and dialogical forum – an essentially open-ended environment, focusing on process rather than outcome. The idea of the laboratory and my results so far will be illustrated by examples from my current work with the artists Tobias Kirstein and Claus Haxholm for the ACTS Festival (at Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark) 2014.
The paper suggests how laboratories and other metaphors of collective artistic and design processes might be adopted in exploring and facilitating experimentation with participatory and performative approaches to central issues of presentation and representation – and how engaging with sound performance from this curatorial perspective has the potential to question dichotomous categories like event/document or live/archive.