Július Fujak works at the Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts Constantine the Philosopher University. He is an aesthetic scholar, a semiotician of music, experimental composer and multi-instrumentalist. He graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University, Bratislava (aesthetics and musical sciences, 1990); Later he became a researcher at the Institute of Literary and Artistic Communication in Nitra (1996-2007). Currently, he lectures at Department of Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher in Nitra (since 2007).
His compositions and intermedia projects were performed and broadcasted in many countries of Europe, USA, and China. He has organised for twenty years the international series and festivals of contemporary, unconventional music and intermedia art Hermes´s Ear in Nitra and PostmutArt.
Sonic Photography as a Trace of Kairos
The paper is focused on the semantic existential ability of sonic, field (or private, personal) recordings to save and share a non-verbalised essence of the past moments in concrete space & time contexts. We can find certain parallels between Roland Barthes´ understanding of photography in his Camera Lucida (1980) and phenomenality of sonic photos/records (of seemingly banal situations in ordinary environments full of unexpected and unpredictable sounding events). The photographic dimension of sound recordings as a special (sometimes re-discovering) inner experiences could be interpreted also in the frame of ancient notion kairos, which expresses e. g. the non-linear temporality of “that right moment” (even if it could be somewhat very subjective). The question of temporal qualities in the perception process of “sonic kairos” will be related with the thoughts of Jaroslav Vančát (Photography as a time-creating concept, 2006).