SYMPOSIUM | NEUROMACHT: Noise and the Possibility for a Future

Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things. (Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music)

Noise is prevalent in our post- industrial society; whether it be the cacophony of the factory and the war machine that initially inspired the Futurists such as Luigii Russolo, the dissonance of the public space which encouraged indoor living in earlier times and noise barriers along the highway today or that excess which diminishes efficiency in communication network systems, the so called Shannon’s Theorem or the noisy –channel coding theorem. Noise gets a bad rap as something considered offensive and that needs to be controlled or mitigated. However, noise has another side more positive and emancipatory. This conference utilizes the history of noise and music to stake a claim for noise as a liberating mode of production while at the same time understanding its dystopian possibility “ that mode of productions baleful mirror image.” (Frederic Jameson, Introduction in Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music)

with Warren Neidich, Peter Weibel, Mathieu Copeland
together with Katja Hupatz
and Priska Pasquer