For interesting resource on sonic art visit http://www.sonicartsnetwork.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=3&Itemid=84

Last week I mentioned a couple of links to how you could theoretically position some of your writings on audiences. However both the positions I wrote about (reception theory and the ‘death of the author’) were taken from the point of view of the audience as interpreter. As artists we are usually much more interested in theoretical approaches that empower us to communicate our ideas. One of the most successful is the use of rhetoric.
Rhetoric as a discipline has been used for thousands of years and used to be a large formal part of everyone’s education. However this is no longer the case.
I started to get interested in it as a way of helping me make better decisions about the images I was making during the 1980s. On recommendation I read Francis Yates’ book ‘the Art of Memory’ a wonderful text that makes you aware of how important memory was to society before universal literacy. Memory training was part of rhetorical training and as soon as I started to get more into what this consisted of, I realised that I had unearthed a fantastic system that could be used to make decisions as to not only how something was working, but how to push ideas forward.
For instance one of the rhetorical ‘tropes’ is metaphor. Artists use metaphor all the time, but examining it under the umbrella of rhetoric you come to a deeper understanding of how it works as a persuasive tool. Rhetoric is one of the three arts of discourse; the others are logic and dialectic. Logic was something I was introduced to when I did my Dip AD and was introduced to British analytical philosophy and Wittgenstein. A dialectic approach was something I was already using as I thought of conceptual art very much as an argument or dialogue with my audience. But I hadn’t understood that rhetoric was probably the most powerful of all three. Rhetoric was aimed at teaching senators to persuade audiences of the veracity of their argument and it was very precise in the way it worked. However first of all if you want to use it you need to think through how to translate the training as it is for the use of the spoken word and not for the making of art objects. For instance ‘Alliteration’ is a rhetorical trope. It explains how the repetition of the same sound at the beginning of several words in sequence helps a speaker to engage an audience’s attention in the way the words are connected, not just by meaning but by a deeper ‘sound’ value. You can use this in the way you build things. Repeating variations of a form throughout an installation or sculpture can convince the viewer that there is a common visual idea that flows throughout the formal values that you have set up. However ‘Anacoluthon’; which means a lack of grammatical sequence or a change in the grammatical construction within the same sentence can be used in visual constructions when you want to draw attention to a change in concept. You can suddenly change materials or colour to create a moment of attention to a particular aspect of what you have built.
Another trope is ‘Anadiplosis’ which means ‘doubling back’, it is the rhetorical repetition of one or several words; more specifically, repetition of a word that ends one clause at the beginning of the next. The visual equivalent of this is making sure each object within an installation has something about it that reflects a visual quality that is found in its neighbour. This can help the read as an audience strives to understand how to piece together your thinking.
‘Anastrophe’: the transposition of normal word order can be used to create unexpected juxtapositions and therefore engage your audience’s attention. An obvious visual version of this is to put unexpected formal sequences together. I could go on, but I would hope that by now you have the idea. Just look up ‘rhetoric tropes’ on the internet and find out what they mean, you could then try and apply some to what you are trying to do. It worked for Warhol, ‘repetition’ is a rhetoric trope.