Jorge
David García, Rossana Lara, Aarón Escobar, Andrea Gutiérrez,
Miguel Angel Cuevas & Antonio Morales*
*
Ruido 13 Collective
Escuela
Nacional de Música, UNAM, México
elruido13@gmail.com
Abstract
In
this paper we describe a project of sound installation using waste
electric appliances and speakers mounted on bicycles to reproduce in
the streets of Mexico City a collage of voices and sounds of people
that use noise as a central element of creation. This project has to
do with alternative ways of transport, alternative use of bicycles
and household technology, with other uses of scholarly research,
collective self-organization and sustainability in artistic
production. For us all these are forms of noise. How we understand
noise and its effects, how we combine research and artistic practice
and what is the social scope of the project will be presented in the
following text.
Keywords:
Sound experimentation, collective work, noise practice,
Do-It-Yourself
Introduction
Ruido
13
is a collective of musicians established in Mexico City. This project
arose in 2012 from our interest in linking our musical practice with
the vast range of social dynamics, places and noises that shape the
urban space where we live. Noise is for us not necessarily a sound;
it is also an activity anyone can deliberately produce to disrupt the
social dynamics configured and naturalized by this urban space.
Echoing Jacques Attali’s (2009) reading of noise proposed in his
survey on the political economy of music, making noise means to us to
contradict and subvert in different ways aspects of the prevailing
social, political, and economical order through our artistic
practice.
Most
recently we have been working on a project that involves several
dimensions of noise production. It consists of a mobile sound
installation using speakers that reproduce a collage of voices and
sounds of different people involved in the experimental audiovisual
and sonic practices in Mexico. For this purpose we made previously
some interviews that are also part of a major research project on the
experimental activity in Mexico carried out by one of the members of
the group. Some of the questions that we share with this research
are: what visions of the world are being performed through these
experimental practices, and how they confront standardized modes of
listening conditioned by media hegemonies.
The
recordings of the first interviews made at the early stage of the
ethnography were considered for our sound installation. Fragments of
the interviewee’s work, sound pieces and improvisations as well as
recorded soundscapes were also included. It is worth mentioning that
the interviewees agreed to share, both the recorded interviews and
their work so that we could edit and reassemble it freely, dissolving
the authorial ownership of the final result. The sound collage is
generated randomly while we ride the bicycles by triggering the
edited audio fragments from our MP3 players connected to the speakers
of our bikes.
For
the sound installation, the speakers were mounted on bicycles so that
the mechanical rotation produced by riding is converted through a
dynamo into electric current for feeding the speakers. We also
designed and mounted some electronic circuits on the bikes to obtain
direct current from the engine, to regulate voltage and amplify the
speakers. The project was inspired in Do-It-Yourself (DIY) modes of
production that, among other things, seek to create personalized new
functions for daily artifacts including out-of-date technologies and
waste materials. Thus we aimed to produce homemade electronic devices
with recycled engines to give our bikes an additional function as a
mobile sound installation. We completed this stage of the project by
ridding the bicycles through some of Mexico City’s streets.
In
the following sections we present our reading on the kinds and layers
of noise that are involved in the project:
Bikes
as noise in urban traffic
In
Mexico City the use of bicycles is an exception, for the street
network is mostly used by motor vehicles. There are very few cycle
lanes, lacking a culture of respect for cyclists that could encourage
the safe use of bicycles.
It
is worth noting that Mexico City is not only one of the largest and
most populated cities in the world, but also one of the cities with
the highest concentration of motor vehicles. According to Mexico
City’s Secretary of Transport (SETRAVI), there are daily more than
three million motor vehicles driving on the streets, among which more
than one million nine hundred thousand are for private use.
Additionally there is an indiscriminate use of private vehicles
transporting only one person most of the time. According to the
National Network of Urban Cycling (Bici-Red) it is estimated a
financial loss of 4% of gross domestic product because of the
excessive use of motorcars (http://5porciento.bicired.org/). By
contrast, different cycling organizations have arisen in the last
years and are working together with NGOs, academic institutions, and
private initiative for the improvement in air quality and more
efficient modes of transportation
(http://www.bicired.org/web/com/137-biciredmx).
In Mexico City there is an important local cycling movement since 15
years called Bicitekas
–a term that combines the words “bici” (bike) and “teka”,
from “azteca”– (http://bicitekas.org/).
These movements are continuously pressing the government to change
the politics of urban transport in Mexico and encourage
non-motorized, sustainable transport.
We
are interested in joining these existing cycling movements in a near
future, considering this project of sound installation/intervention
as a first step. To sum up, with this installation we want to
emphasize the noise that the free collective movement of bicycles
generate on the streets blocked by dozens of motorcars.
Do-It-Yourself
approach and collective work as noise
Recycling
engines recovered from waste household appliances like dryers, fans,
and drills to generate sound is the kernel of this project. By
recovering this electric waste with minimal social value, we move
away from the capitalist modes of consumption and waste. Furthermore,
by integrating the engines of waste appliances into a context that
escapes from the logic of production and consumption for which these
engines were designed, we aim to produce a sort of noise in the
production cycle. It is worth noting that while an engine is
associated in the context of urban traffic to the generation of
polluting gases, in this project the recycled engine provides the
electricity for the speakers; and by doing this it contributes to
evidence sonically the presence of the bikes as an efficient vehicle
in a see of sub utilized car engines.
Considering
that we are interested in exploring ways to join the principles of
DIY culture, one of our main concerns has been self-management and
collective work in developing our artistic devices. One aspect of DIY
ideology is the empowerment of individuals for creating alternative
ways to satisfy their necessities in daily life, without depending on
the dominant systems of government and consumption. It covers a range
of forms of political activism, promoting collective
self-organization to “create more sustainable and fairer ways of
living”. In opposition to capitalism and consumer culture, DIY
cultivates “an economy of mutual aid, cooperation,
non-commodification of art, appropriation of digital and
communication technologies and alternative technologies” (Trapese
Collective, 2007).
These
are also the underlying principles of our collective and the values
behind the present project. Accordingly, it was important to ensure
that the technical costs were consistent with the principle of
sustainability we want to emphasize with the collective bicycle trip
around the city. This artistic project is not oriented to get a
sponsor in the future, but to call more people to replicate in other
places this mobile sound installation with bicycles and waste
electric materials. To this end, we have made a manual describing the
process and the minimal technical requirements to execute it, with
the idea that there will be as many variants as creative minds
working together. The emergence of cooperation groups to develop
non-profit artistic projects promoting a creative and sustainable use
of technology is part of the revolution the activist wing of DIY
culture believes in. As the Trapese Collective points out in its
illustrative book on DIY: “Doing ourselves [...] is [...] a
revolution that takes place everyday amongst all of us rather than
some huge event led by a small vanguard in a hoped-for-future. Not
waiting for bosses, politicians or experts to take the initiative but
building at the grassroots –empowering ourselves and improving our
own realities– not to become individual entrepreneurs or
free-marketeers, but to work together to make open, sustainable and
equal societies” (Trapese Collective, 2007).
Noise
vs. Noise
Besides
the already mentioned noises that disturb certain logics of
capitalism, this project of sound installation aims to insert sounds
in the public space that are not familiar to the noise of the streets
mostly produced by motorcars. It is worth saying that there is a
tendency to conceive acoustic noise as unwanted sound. The approach
to noise as a major social problem of urban living has been
increasingly reinforced along the twentieth century through the
apparition of hundreds of organizations, legislations, institutions,
and industries created with the purpose of abating and regulating
noise (see Bijsterveld, 2008).
By
contrast to that way of conceiving city noise in absolute negative
terms, we wanted to add to the traffic noise other noises to exhibit
its aesthetical, and therefore constructive possibilities. Even in
the chaotic context of Mexico City’s streets there was an
opportunity to reappraise noise as a form of knowledge and a medium
of expression. With this in mind we proposed to reproduce in our
speakers a sort of collage made of voices and sounds of people in
Mexico that use noise as a central element of creation. They speak
about their noise’s conceptions and strategies as well as the role
of DIY modes of production in their sonic experimental projects. As
mentioned at the beginning of the text, the recorded voices are
extracts from interviews made as part of a larger ethnographic
research on experimental sonic practices in Mexico. The research
focuses on proposals where sound is only part either of the process
or the outcome and the focus lies rather in the interactions and
social situations that these materials, processes, and strategies
produce.
Our
decision to incorporate the ethnographic material, i.e. the recorded
interviews, in a sound installation is a first experiment to combine
the individual research with the collective artistic work. In this
way, research work is not only confined to the academic context where
there is mostly a private use of the material collected and preserved
by the researcher during the ethnographic work. By contrast, we want
to take the research work out from the institutional context and
share it publicly. In our view, the aesthetic use and mode of
propagation we propose for the research material create a noise, both
in the context of the street and in the modes of production of
scholarly work. By inserting these sounds in the streets, we want to
socialize the aesthetic possibilities of noise through which more and
more people perform their ways of being in, and modes of listening to
the world.
Conclusions
As
shown in the text this project of sound installation generates
several noises in the logic of production, consumption and modes of
human relationship shaped by capitalism. Nevertheless, at this stage
we are still valuing the actual effects of the project; firstly, the
social situations generated in different regions of the city as well
as in the varying context of the street; secondly, the integration of
this project in the already existing cycling movements in Mexico,
starting with the above mentioned Bicitekas
movement. By joining these organizations we could add a sound
dimension to the actions they already perform in the street to
visualize the bicycle as a sustainable mode of transport, hoping that
this also encourages a new sensitivity to the sounds of the street
and other kind of noises of the city.
The documentation and current state of the project is available on the websites: http://proyectoruicicletero.tumblr.com/
References
Attali,
J. (2009). Noise.
The Political Economy of Music (10th
printing). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Bijsterveld,
K. (2008). Mechanical
Sound. Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the
Twentieth Century.
Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
The
Trapese Collective (Ed). (2007). Do
It Yourself. A Handbook for Changing our World.
London: Pluto Press.
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