Rustications: Animals in the Urban Mix (2014) Steven Connor. Animals cause a problem to the concept of soundscape: When we hear birds singing, we are not witnessing nature, we are “overhearing” fragments of communication (possibly concerning life and death matters).
20180730
“Loosing privilege feels like oppression”.
A quote form a participant of the On Whiteness: The Reading Group: On Space and Sound session. Baseera Khan who hosted the event, invited us to read Mabel O. Wilson’s Mine Not Yours. The text didn’t refer to sounds directly but the discussions were stimulating. We focused on the topic of ownership and who has the right to make noise. I remembered Soft Coercion, the City and the Recorded Female Voice (2017) Nina Power after the talk. We learned that Seinfeld&Friends were vessels for gentrification (a call for the for white middle-class to return to the inner city) and that the concept nonviolent resistance is a myth.
The event prompted me to read Gezi Park Protests and the Political Soundscapes of Istanbul (2016) E. Sirin Ozgun & Meri Kytö which is a good text detailing how sounds & noises were involved in the Gezi Park protests (2013-14). The text introduces readers to “acoustemology” (the epistemological nature of sound), “earing” (an sound studies & ethnography method of researching heard experiences) and it offers a compact overview of the history of protest which led to the Gezi Park protests/Taksim square events. Importantly silent protests are highlighted.
The Toxic Legacy of Zombie Formalism, Part 1: How an Unhinged Economy Spawned a New World of ‘Debt Aesthetics’ (2018) Chris Wiley
Finance was turning toward various forms of derivatives—collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, mortgage backed securities, etc.—which had the benefit of being loosely regulated, complex to the point of opacity, and hugely profitable. To those weaned in this environment, the art market must have looked quite attractive: It, too, is largely unregulated, with chandelier bidding and price fixing at the major auction houses, plus tax evasion and money laundering among collectors.
20180728
Water is an organ #ॐ. During my ride to Kensington stables I must have lost liters of liquids. It took me three days to recover, I hurt my back and I lost concentration. Recovering.
Bumped my bike on the Williamsburg Bridge railing, flew over the rod and bent my front wheel. Only bruises. Forced the wheel back to shape by kicking. It was 18:45. I searched online for a bike repairs shop. One was open for an other 15 min. Rushed to the shop, the wheel rubbing against the breaks. Got a spoke nipple tightener, the very last they had on rack. Cruised home and fixed my bike. A successful Sunday.
20180726
Visited Luke Moldof’s gig which is a part of the Pennies From Heaven #4 series organized by the Control (store) and Bánh Mì Verlag. We were taken on a sonic journey. Transitions between scenes were fluid. The trip highlighted at 4th July fireworks, the noisyness of which was pulled to sonic focus. The gig started with a horse eating / stable ambient sample.
Gender as Colonial Object – The spread of Western gender categories through European colonization (2018) Lucas Ballestín. A good follow up to last Sundays reading group discussions.
20180725
Envision Yourself as Fossil in the Future – consultation.
- First we discuss what noise is. We listen to field recordings, samples of white or pink noise, the sound of our hands rubbing against each other and talk about what these noises sound & feel like.
- Example. We try to visualise the shape and texture of our hands through the noises they make when rubbed against each other.
- We discuss what media is. Information can be stored into different substances. Substances change when information is recorded. What we hear when listening to recorded sounds is how the media changed when information was stored to it.
- We listen to blank recordings and amplified silence.
- We try to imagine how traces of this time are transmitted to the far future. Some of our messages will travel so far that they will be considered fossils when they reach their audiences.
- A FM transmission might get stuck and orbit the sun, to be heard/experienced a millennia from today.
- We think about noise. How the sound of noise bounces from surfaces it hits and changes. Samples of its grains map out every sound that has existed and demarcate every sound that will exist.
- We listen to entropy. Let’s try to imagine shape of our hands through the sound of our hands rubbing against each other.
- When we listen to noise carefully: We can hear sounds of today – The way they will heard in the future.
- This is how we can discover our fossilised remains in the future.