Experimentalisms in Practice by Alonso-Minutti Ana R.; Herrera Eduardo; Madrid Alejandro L

Author:Alonso-Minutti, Ana R.; Herrera, Eduardo; Madrid, Alejandro L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2018-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

PROCESSES: DISRUPTION AND INNOVATION AGAINST WHAT?

While Matt Sakakeeny describes music as “an idea and a problem,” David Novak defines noise as “a powerful antisubject of culture, raising essential questions about the staging of human expression, socialization, individual subjectivity, and political control.”42 Novak is defining noise itself, not Noise music. However, I adopt his general definition of noise to delimit it as an aesthetic principle of Noise music. If Noise is an “antisubject” and music is an “idea,” how did the dynamic between the ontologies of these terms inform the dispute in Costa Rica? Broadly speaking, the confrontation came from the fact that an idea of music had been constructed in relation to Western musical notation whose symbolic violence continues to be applied to the sound imaginaries of non-Western or nonacademic cultures. In the background, the dispute encountered music as an ethnohistoric problem.43

This confrontation developed from the history of ideas, represented here by philosophical traditions and histories of Western music, sustained in written text, and transmitted by education and notated music. Costa Rican noisiers developed a symbol to represent the process by which Noise becomes an antisubject, nonmusic: a pair of crossed-out eighth notes. This act of symbolic resistance to the codes imposed by notated music seems to define not just their manner of understanding sound but also the ceremonies that constitute the actions and artistic productions in which they participate, productions characterized by performativity with the machine (in the tradition of computer music), orality and improvisation (preserved in the recorded support), distribution on the Internet, and the utilization of scenic resources inherited from happening and multimedia art. An example of this type of multimedia proposal is Blinded (2015), by Sergio Fuentes, described in the following manner: “With this multidisciplinary project, in which the image, sound and installation are unified under a philosophical exploration, Sergio Wiesengrund proposes the error as a jumping off point for expression.”44Blinded is also an example of the conjunction between noise and glitch described by Castro. This work was included in the exposition Teramorfosis, curated by Lola Malavassi for the TEOR/éTica Arts Foundation.45 Regarding Fuentes’s proposal, Chaves-Espinach writes: “In Teramorfosis, the work most explicitly critical of the political and economic system may be Blinded, a video installation on three screens of the Wiesengrund Project (Sergio Wiesengrund [Noise] and Mariela Sandía [videoart]). With damaged video and sound files, they generate disturbing textures with images of newsreels, popular videos and half recognizable soundscapes.”46

But what would happen if we were to bring together the two worlds supposedly separated by the episteme of notated music?47 What would happen if what we understand by Noise, in its utilization of noise and improvisation, was put to the test in its technological mediation? During the meeting “Philosophy and Music in Dispute: Noise,” an exercise was proposed: noisier Alejandro Sánchez and academic musician José Manuel Rojas were invited to dialogue and improvise from a work of Sánchez, Monumentum(figs. 8.4 and 8.5).48 This exercise, in which Sánchez (computer) and Rojas (English horn) explored noise together with

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