Navigating Noise means getting off the beaten track in order to find, or rather, to create something new. This publication is the result of such unconventional navigations, which follow the track of noise on its path across art, science, and the humanities. The point of departure is the artwork Navigating Navigating Noise by Kerstin Ergenzinger. This ephemeral, somewhat Navigating out-worldly sound installation provides the framework for a collection of academic and artistic contributions that address the need for alternative means of orientation to deal with noise and to understand and (re)establish our unstable position within a highly technologized, mediated, and globalized reality. These navigations cover a broad terrain of research: from the starry skies to the deep oceans, from the ice cores of Greenland to sonic navigation in the animal kingdom, from spatial acoustics in World War I to noise music. Through a multidisciplinary approach, Navigating Noise paves the way for unexpected connections between research domains located at the border of knowing and not knowing. This endeavour tries to dig through and below existing semantic and epistemic systems. The contributors scrutinize the binary dichotomies of noise/information, noise/meaning, and noise/silence in order to reconfigure the relational framework that is constituted by these dichotomies. Released from this, noise no longer serves as the unwanted, semantic-free, and inefficient antithesis Noise that should be discarded, but rather embodies a dynamic, unpredictable, yet constitutive force with which we can soar towards more agile forms of sonic sense production. Noise Noise is the dynamic condition of the possibility for any form of meaning. It is through the navigation of noise that we are – figuratively speaking – able to ‘know’. , With contributions by: African Noise Foundation, Lino Camprubí, Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek, Volume No. 54 Nathanja van Dijk, Kerstin Ergenzinger, ISBN 978-3-96098-260-9 ISBN 978-3-96098-260-9 , Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König Berlin Felix Gerloff, Paul Hegarty, Seth Horowitz, , , Tim Ingold, Eleni Ikoniadou, Christian Kassung, Brandon LaBelle, Thomas Laepple, Heike Catherina Mertens, Patricia Pisters, Wolfgang Schäffner, Sebastian Schwesinger, Martin Skrydstrup 9783960 982609 https://soundcloud.com/navigatingnoise Dijk van Nathanja by Edited Ergenzinger Kerstin Kassung Christian Schwesinger Sebastian 1 Navigating Noise Edited by Nathanja van Dijk, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Christian Kassung, Sebastian Schwesinger 2 Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Series Editor Christian Posthofen Volume No. 54 Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König 4 Contents The Poetry of the Subtle Wandering Off. In Conversation Foreword by with Kerstin Ergenzinger and Heike Catherina Mertens Patricia Pisters 8 Nathanja van Dijk 110 The Functionality of Sounding Spaces An Ecology of Noise. Foreword by Three Orientations Wolfgang Schäffner Brandon LaBelle 14 124 Sono-Aesthetics Navigating Noise and Eleni Ikoniadou other Acts of Orientations. 134 Drawings and prints Kerstin Ergenzinger 12-13, 18-23, 58-59, THE SONIC → 164 108-109, 122-123, 132-133, 166-167, What Does It Mean to Think Soni- 192-193, 216-217, cally? Contours of Noise as a Sonic 242-243, 268-269, Figure of Thought 296-301 Felix Gerloff & Sebastian Schwesinger 168 LEITMOTIFS → 24 Navigating Noise at NEEM. To Navigate Noise. Introduction Dialogues between Anthropolo- Nathanja van Dijk gy and Climate Science on the 26 Spectres of Sound Martin Skrydstrup & Thomas Laepple Noise, Sound, Silence 194 Tim Ingold 38 Trying to Hear the Way. A Neuro- ethological Perspective on Noise Falling Darts, a Lost Submari- and Signal in Auditory Navigation ne, and a Blind Man. Notes on Seth Horowitz the Media History of Navigating 218 through Noise Christian Kassung The Empty Signal. Noisy Channels 60 and Noise Music Paul Hegarty 244 NAVIGATING NOISE → 84 The Sonic Construction of the White Noise in Eight Amplified Ocean as the Navy’s Operating Movements (for Clarice Lispector) Environment African Noise Foundation Lino Camprubí 96 270 Biographies 292 Colophon 303 6 7 Foreword by Heike Catherina Mertens common with the Analog Storage Media laboratory group of the Image Knowledge Gestaltung Cluster of Excellence at Humboldt University, Berlin. Contact was quickly estab- The Poetry of the Subtle lished. The key focus of the artistic and scientific research was the question: How do we orient ourselves in space with the aid of sound? It is often the more quiet, minimalistic artworks one discov- ers in the midst of large art fairs or group exhibitions that After intense preparations, in May 2015 Kerstin Ergenzinger’s cause a tone to sound within us, a tone which then begins to first solo exhibition in Berlin, Acts of Orientation, opened at echo and, still resounding, initiates a concert of associations the Schering Stiftung. Navigating Noise hovered right below and further sounds that inscribe themselves upon our minds. the ceiling in a honeycomb-shaped structure that filled the When I first met Kerstin Ergenzinger in 2014 and began entire room, greeting the visitor with noises and sounds. to look through her portfolio, I encountered a work I had As in ‘Studies for Longing’, the design is minimalist, but already seen: Studien zur Sehnsucht (‘Studies for Longing’ ). here pieces of the complex technical network are visible. 130 Composed of a series of grey rubber mats piled one on top metres of piano and nitinol muscle wire are connected to the of the other on the ground and able to be put in motion by a honeycomb-shaped aluminium architecture, which serves as mechanism invisible to the visitor, the artist has constructed a a resonance chamber. Upon more careful observation, the landscape which functions as a projection screen for all of our visitor can see how the nitinol wire sets the piano strings in various longings connected to formations of mountains and motion, thus creating various tones. And yet, the control pro- earth. It is an extremely poetic work, a work which is only gramme remains concealed. able to have such an intense effect on the viewer thanks to the utmost precision with which Kerstin Ergenzinger has trans- Visitors are free to move about the room and navigate the formed her scientific studies into what are technically highly sounds on their own. These synthetic sounds simulating complex installations whose minimalist forms and carefully everyday noises from animals to the buzzing of power lines chosen materials carry an outstanding artistic signature. have, however, been programmed in such a way that their abstracted nature leaves listeners with only themselves as a By the time of our first meeting, Kerstin Ergenzinger had point of reference. Navigating Noise is a one-to-one installa- already been working with the physicist Thomas Laepple tion in which the ever-changing relationship between human on the installation Navigating Noise. Up until that point, the beings, space, and sound best unfolds when visitors find work had been suspended in pieces on her living room ceiling, themselves in the room alone and ‘trail after’ the sounds but it had reached a stage of development that necessitated a or follow them by means of their own movements. For larger space for it to be fully realized and tested. Toget her Navigating Noise is a poetic and subtle study of our spatial with curator Nathanja van Dijk, director of A Tale of Tub in awareness and simultaneously an experiential space for our Rotterdam, we began to speak about trying a test set-up at sense of hearing. As we know, our eyes and ears often deceive the Schering Stiftung in Berlin. Navigating Noise soon turned us as to the complexity of our visible and audible world. We out to be an ideal project for our exhibition programme. The see and hear only that which we are ready to perceive. Our installation proved to be not only an exceptional example of day-to-day life is overlaid with the sounds of our technologi- contemporary sound art, which we regularly display in our cal and digital world, and the buzzing of our smartphones has project space and support at other art institutions, but also long replaced the nightingale as the background noise we hear an interdisciplinary research project that had many points in in the night. 8 9 Starting with Navigating Noise as a space of artistic research, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Thomas Laepple, and Nathanja van Dijk then laid the foundations for this publication with their inter- disciplinary research project Acts of Orientation. The con- ference of the same name that they organized in collaboration with the Analog Storage Media research group of the Image Knowledge Gestaltung Cluster of Excellence, which took place in May 2015 at Humboldt University, has also found its way into this book in the form of numerous contributions. The importance of the questions posed by all of our contributors as to how we orient ourselves in space through sound becomes explicitly clear when considering, for example, how the auto- mobile industry is working under significant pressure to find intelligent solutions for making electric cars audible in order to limit the growing number of traffic accidents. First and foremost, I would like to thank Kerstin Ergenzinger for her wonderful work Navigating Noise, which has given us a space for aesthetic (self-)experience. Nathanja van Dijk deserves special thanks for having organized the exhibition, conference, and publications. Next I would like to thank Wolfgang Schäffner, Christian Kassung, and Sebastian Schwesinger of the Image Knowledge Gestaltung Cluster of Excellence at Humboldt University, Berlin, for their magnif- icent teamwork – both within the framework of the Acts of Orientation conference and on this current publication. My sincere thanks as well to all of the authors and contributors involved in the joint research for the book Navigating Noise, as their openness and their artistic as well as humanistic and sci- entific research led to numerous extraordinary insights, many of which are documented in this work.