"Music happens when being shared with other people." Matias Aguayo, in a lecture

Urban areas make sound and are full of possibilities to disperse sound - not forgetting their own.
Consider the following experiment: record urban sonic phenomena. Play the recordings back to the city using sound transducers through various materials, structures and forms. The balustrades, glass-fronts and drain pipes playing their own sounds will amplify themselves and start resonating. Soon the whole city will build up a feedback, reverberating its own score.
A possible aim of this investigation could be to bring a simple algorithm into the city; a software encoded as a rhythmic sequence of sound, open for the city's changes (since it is exposed to them). A flexible future information network such as this evolves from its own crises: the permanent alteration would constantly trigger the self-organization of a network that organizes itself in and through alteration.

Dance styles emerge from collective processes. They are carried on over generations and to different areas, develop regional dialects and preserve their flexibility to adapt to niches for a few people. Dance is a form of language.

"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

We rely on transportation, food supply chains, the internet, the media, all kind of industries, all the machines that we have unleashed. Their information sequences and digital transactions go far beyond our perception. However a muffled pumping remains... a rhythmic throb, a constant vibration, a subtle whir, a fizzing around, a piercing shriek. Once we stop ignoring it, it all comes crashing down about our ears. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Over and over again iterating the collapse. We force the pace to constantly accelerate, speeding up the process, sabotaging our goods, our organs, our systems, forcing them to become obsolete, initiating self-destruction.
We root out every secret that is not rooted deep enough and unfold it to the blazing sun, to scorching criticism, to dry out each and every fact, knowing that we will reincarnate as rhizomes in multidimensional space, feeling that we have become aliens.

Reliable news is spread by gossip and carrier pigeons provide the smallest data carrier, then fed to mechanical computers built and used in an auditory space (they are operated via bucket drums outputting machine code). To this world rhythms are vital, the rhythm of speech, of thought, of movement and dance. Not only do they carry information, they are information, potential energy that informs each and every body.

(tiny cracks that sum up to what we refer to as wall)

Plain insufficiency

We cut a swath through this tangled world, a straight line loophole for all intents and purposes and a straight view over this jungle that only appeared to be intangible, multidimensional, but that we knew would turn out to be flat (once we flattened it).
And rasterized. Composed of precisely arranged concrete districts, subdivided by straight tarmaced lines and seemingly sleek concrete walls. With sticky city traffic stopping and starting between blocks and buildings, a viscous flow or a stream, transport system, water system, communication or media network, power network, the world wide web... diverse movements that divide and connect people. As we start listening to its rhythms, structures, bodies, vibrations, its sound, we discover that the the city is crowded to overflowing with sonic information and thus cause and purpose both of and for a future auditive information system.
As futuristic as this may sound, it is not the ever-advancing, hyper-engineered, super efficient vision of what is to come but the idea of advancing backwards and in all directions: This future is an ocean and we are navigating on it now. Going nowhere and yet getting everywhere — in circles — or is it spirals? — on our raft made of plastic bottles or as we call them: re-invented wheels.
We are gambling away our time playing (cards, instruments, programming, tinkering, soldering , cooking, doing stuff outdoors, listening… listening real hard… and again programming…). And there is really nothing else to do, no meaningful machine to bow to and work for, just this wasteland of time. We contemplate all of our playing, about how time is all you need and unpayable, not with money at any rate.
If we needed money, we'd have invented it ourselves by now. But we didn't, we invented other stuff. Things that are better shared than stored and ideas that need no protection but need to be spread. We believe in the importance of being in contact with and open for others as well as ourselves, in making new and old friends, in watching slide shows together that show slides none of us know, so we can make up a whole new meaning for them, construct worlds that never existed but are based on our shared experience of watching flat pictures developed on razor-thin glass that beg for being shattered to burst into a thousand sounds, crowding it with a million perspectives, possibilities and with its chaos ever more obscuring this world we're making up.
Until we decide to cut a swath through this tangled world, a straight line loophole for all intents and purposes and for a straight view over this jungle that only appeared to be intangible, multidimensional, but that we knew would turn out to be flat (once we flattened it).

Microscopic and macroscopic structures of urban sound (work in progress, 2012)

As an approach to the microscopic spheres of urban sound, I work towards carving out grains of the city's noises using contact microphones. Via time lapse, I perceptualize macroscopic structures, rhythms and single notes that extend over hours and days.

Honey