Sound system aesthetics in contemporary art

The Jamaican sound system is an assemblage of practices and ideas that make things visible, audible and tactile, which would otherwise remain obscured, a machine for waging epistemological warfare and mobilizing creative capacities otherwise excluded. This article explores such practices in the work of Nadine Robinson and Tom Sachs, two artists who deploy sound system methods and materials in their work. In studying sound systems’ iterations in the world of contemporary art, this article proposes that Jamaican sonic practice is generative of distinctive aesthetic and critical strategies.