friday, 4 october 2013
them. With this in mind, the interdisciplinary collective Ruido 13 has developed projects that combine sonic experimentation and auto-ethnography, with concerns about how to extend the experimental practice beyond the circuits of experimental art. Our interest is to encourage different people to experiment with sonic situations, linking practices with discussions about the relationship between social practices, noises and soundscapes in Mexico City, as well as people’s possibilities in the active shaping of those sound spaces. All these aspects converge closely in our most recent project Ruicicletas itinerantes (in English, ‘Noise-riders project’) that will be shown at this symposium. In the current state of the project, we use both the energy produced by riding a bicycle and some electronic circuits to amplify sonically the bicycle mechanisms. This action is to be performed collectively through different urban contexts of Mexico City. Experiences of this action in context, as well as the spreading of the project in workshops, have contributed to modify our initial perspectives and goals not only at the level of the project but also at the level of the collective’s aspirations and its relationship with the sonic experimental scene in the city. How the project has changed over time, and what their current and future possibilities might be, will be presented at the symposium with an audiovisual record of the project. Ruido 13 is an interdisciplinary collective from Mexico City that relates sound experimentalism with broader social dynamics and noises that shape the urban space where we live. Guided by topics of free culture, self-management and social uses of the acoustic space, our practice combines free improvisation with other acoustic situations to intervene in the public space. Additionally, the collective is interested in the expansion of sonic experimental activity into groups with no previous musical training nor familiarity with those practices.
Adam Potts Noise, Nausea and the Night: Distinguishing between active and passive noise The aim of this presentation is to discuss the entangled relationship between two different—though fundamentally dependent—types of noise. While the ubiquity of noise and its disparate configurations are often tied together through ideas of negativity and radicalism, I want to suggest that it is the way in which the language of noise resists and withholds from these ideas that fundamentally makes noise what it is. Basing my argument on Maurice Blanchot’s belief that language sustains itself in absence, I will argue that nothing can be fixed and essentialised within the language of noise. Distinguishing between what I will be calling active noise and passive noise, I will expose the supposedly essential ideas of negativity to what Blanchot sees as the 9