lecture performance “On the air Today”

Feedback loops between critical infrastructure and radical noise

at Bergen School of Architecture in the context of Bergen Assembly Art Triennale and @radio.kontakt program.

 

Just as we breathe the air, sound moves through it. And as air may also be used to create inflatable volumes, they for their part make infrastructures and sites. Sites become space through practices and practices can make noise. noise, however entails a critical inclination; noise undermines the conventional modernist idea of communication as hierarchy between transmitter and receiver. Against this backdrop noise can be read as both, a critique of any epistemological regime and its media as well as a promise of an utopian mode of production. This is not all. One could argue that noise also leads us back to the “universal right to breathe” which Achille Mbembe called upon recently to situate the transformations of late capitalism within global and historical totalities of oppression and struggle. Taking the radio and the inflatable structure as points of departure, Christopher Dell excercises a series of feedback loops on questions of how space is mediated through practices, how practices produce space and how infrastructures can be read as active forms.