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Radical Sound Utopies in Transforming Urban Spaces (…beyond noise)

Marathon performative lecture and sound-film program with Roland Schoeny

“For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.” (Jaques Attali)

Parallel to the rapid acceleration, fractures and changes in the urban spaces of the big city centres of modernity since the early 20th century radically new aesthetic concepts of sound and new forms and styles in music emerged. This led to a remarkable dialectic. From the sounds of destruction of World War I, from the destructive noise of industrial production, from the No Future mood of the late 1970s were peeling out new aesthetics. Some of these trends are well known as Futurism or labelled as Film Avant-Garde of the 1920s and the Bauhaus, as Electronic Music or later as Fluxus, Black Free Jazz, Punk Rock or Industrial Noise Aesthetics and finally New Electronic Music.

What was codified as destruction or anti-production first, was translated into artistic production finally. Semantic fractures led to delimitations and transgressions to new relationsships between sound and fine arts, new perceptions of urban space and last but not least it’s socio-political structures.