Abstract

This thesis focuses on the practice of contemporary visual artist Satch Hoyt, who employs what I am calling an “Afrosonic aesthetic”. Beginning with Hoyt’s expansive art making practice and theory of the Eternal Migration of the Afro Sonic Signifier as an entry point, I argue that Black contemporary artists are attuned to the frequency of Black life, continually creating and accessing technologies that attend to a sonic past, present, and future. This thesis seeks to investigate the sonicity of Hoyt’s artworks that recall this frequency. By drawing upon a constellation of Black Study, blurring the borders of aesthetics, and engaging Hoyt’s Afro Sonic Mapping research project, this thesis shapes a living methodology that can identify, analyze, and archive artworks that contain this notion of an Afrosonic aesthetic to the art historical canon.