Noise by ELKA BONG

“We are emerging, piecemeal and with the greatest ambiguity, the seeds of a new noise, one exterior to the institutions and customary sites of political conflict. A noise of Festival and Freedom, it may create the conditions for a major dis-strategy for the emergence of a truly new society.

“Conceptualizing the coming order on the basis of the designation of the fundamental noise should be the central work of today’s researchers. Of the only worthwhile researchers: undisciplined ones. The ones who refuse to answer new questions using only pre-given tools … because each instrument, each tool, theoretical or concrete implies a sound field, a field of knowledge, and imaginable and explorable universe. Today, a new music is on the rise, one that can neither be expressed nor understood using the old tools, a music produced elsewhere and otherwise. it is not that music or the world have become incomprehensible: the concept of comprehension itself has been changed: there has been a shift in the locus of the perception of things.

“Music was, and still is, a tremendously privileged site for the analysis and revelation of new forms in our society. It announced, before the rest of society, the destruction of sacrifice by exchange and representation, then the stockpiling of the simulacrum of usage to repetition. Thus what once were rites today appear to be wastefulness; what was the foundations of peace appears as antisocial violence; what was an element in the social whole appears as a work of art to be consumed. Our society mimics itself, represents and repeats itself, instead of letting us live.”

~ Jaques Attali, Noise pgs 133-4

Attali is a French economic and social theorist, writer, political adviser and senior civil servant. He co-founded the European program EUREKA, dedicated to the development of new technologies. He also founded the non-profit organization PlaNet Finance, now called Positive Planet. Interested in the arts, he was nominated to serve on the board of the Musée d’Orsay. He has published more than fifty books, including Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985), Labyrinth in Culture and Society: Pathways to Wisdom (1999), and A Brief History of the Future (2006).

AL MARGOLIS
“... is some sort of evil genius working with sources radically altered up to an utterly unrecognizable state, anarchic manifestations moving in compact determination.”
~ Massimo Ricci

WALTER WRIGHT
is an interdisciplinary artist, his practice includes computer programming, music, and video performance. His focus is on “improvisation as a way of being present in the world.”