Tenth Edition

Kat Austen
Miguel Buenrostro
Kate Donovan
Florence Freitag
Brandon LaBelle
Michelle-Marie Letelier

February 7 – 12, 2022
Venue: Errant Bodies, Berlin

For this edition of the Drity Ear Forum, questions of the more-than-human are brought forward. This includes reflecting upon experiences of planetary entanglement, and how we might reimagine human community making from an ecological perspective. Through such reflection, issues around extractivism, the rights of nature, wild law, acoustic ecology and ecofeminism can be considered, allowing for a broad base of knowledge sharing. Central to the Forum is a focus on sound and listening, and in what ways sonic practices and auditory thinking can contribute to ecological and planetary practices. What does it mean to listen beyond the human? Is it possible to reorient understandings of voice to extend toward other life forms? Can sonic materiality open pathways of co-existence, and even trans-species collaboration so as to nurture biodiverse worlding? What potentialities as well as pitfalls do we encounter within models of human and more-than-human connectedness? We’ll follow these questions and concerns through the sharing of practices and knowledges, as well as open discussions so as to foster meeting points and synergies. This will lead to mapping key perspectives as well as potential future directions, so as to deepen processes and methods of planetary engagement.

Ninth Edition

Fouad Asfour
Ricarda Denzer
Kristina Pia Hofer
Brandon LaBelle
Karen Werner
Jelena Petrović
aka Radio
Huda Takriti
Hector Schofield
Anamarija Batista
Lale Rodgarkia-Dara / Nicole Sabella

March 18 – 23, 2019
Venue: Arena Bar, Vienna

This edition of the Dirty Ear Forum aims to consider acoustics as a political question which impacts onto who or what is heard within given environments. Acoustics will be captured as a performative framework to collectively experiment with sonic materiality, voice and musical expression, and discourses around urban life and social struggles. In particular, the notion of a “liquid acoustics” will be mobilised. Liquid acoustics is understood to enable the circulation of the unheard or the bounded: A sonic liquidity that adapts to given conditions in order to cross borders, bypass obstacles, and leak into cracks and crevices. Liquid acoustics may flood the designated arenas of speech with an excess of meaning, laughter, sharing, or through a silence that resists the dictates of the properly spoken. Extending from Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of “liquid modernity”, the Forum will contend with the potentialities and problematics of our contemporary liquid state. This will take place through a series of mini-workshops and shared discussions with participants in collaboration with University of Applied Arts Vienna, as well as through the presentation of events under the heading “experimental research club” held at the Arena Bar. These sessions will adopt the situation of the Bar as a performative space for types of research action, including the staging of materials developed in the Forum, performative works by invited guests, and the crafting of an experimental sociality.

Auszüge aus eine Live-Performance "Lounge music – Loungeová hudba" ein Dialog mit no-input-mixer und Schafen auf Einladung von Brandon LaBelle und Ricarda Denzer's Dirty Ear Forum # 9 sound, multiplicity and radical in Wien, Arena Bar, 20.März- 23.März 2019, Literatur und Sound: Lale Rodgarkia-Dara, Stimmperformance und Übersetzung: Nicole Sabella.

Dirty Ear Forum is an ongoing artistic platform initiated in 2013 by Brandon LaBelle. This edition is organized by Brandon LaBelle and Ricarda Denzer in collaboration with participating artists and researchers, including: Additional collaboration with Art and Communication Practices (KKP) University of Applied Arts Vienna, and Kunstradio.

Document produced by participating students.

( listen )

Eighth Edition

Elena Biserna
Caroline Claus
Lia Garcia
Jerome Gillier
Brandon LaBelle
Anna Raimondo

Lab: February 11 - 16, 2019 / with daily radio streaming
Venue: Q-02, Brussels

Through collective research and experimentation, sound and listening will be utilized to reflect upon the politics of space. This will include drawing into play the key terms of “territoriality” and “invisibility”. How might the spatial qualities and capacities of sound and listening allow for engaging a spatial politics of local environments? If issues of marginality and belonging are understood spatially, in what way might sonic practices allow for socially engaged intervention? Are there forms of collective agency to be discovered through sound’s invisibility? How does recognition emerge through being audible yet unseen? Can listening rework the conditions by which visibility performs?

This edition of the Dirty Ear Forum aims to work through these questions within the context of Q-02, Brussels. This will include experimenting with creative methods and material tactics; capturing and discussing sonic discourses; and mapping a set of reflections on local conditions. In addition, a daily radio stream organized in partnership with Gsara Association will make public the working process, allowing for a performative framework.

Dirty Ear Forum is an ongoing artistic platform initiated in 2013 by Brandon LaBelle. This edition is organized by Brandon LaBelle and Anna Raimondo in collaboration with Q-02.

Performative document:

( listen )

Seventh Edition

Brandon LaBelle
Reuben de Lautour
Sirin Ozgun
Jeremy Woodruff
Ebru Yetiskin

Lab: May 1 - 5, 2017 / Public listening session: May 5th, 2017

Venue: Halka Art Project, Caferaga Mah. Bademalt¦ Sok. No: 24/1, Kad¦köy 34710 Istanbul

In collaboration with the Istanbul Technical University

The Dirty Ear Forum is an experimental platform for sonic research. Occurring in different locations and settings, it is based on the coming together of a selected group of practitioners and thinkers to share and exchange research on sound and listening, and to collectively work through a range of sonic concepts. Each Forum is developed through collective decision-making in how to self-organize, leading to a range of material expressions and theoretical results. At the center of the Forum is a desire to gather together individual viewpoints and practices into a shared activity, emphasizing sound as a conceptual and material platform that enables processes of working together.

This edition of the Dirty Ear Forum will take place at Halka Art Project, and will include an installation open to the public. Based on an audio diary in which all sounds are recorded continuously over the course of four-days, the work takes shape as an amplification procedure: a room fitted with loudspeakers that play back the daily accumulation of audio. Including the input from a diversity of participants who record everything they do and everyone they meet, the work performs as an auditory composite of life lived.

Installation recording:

( listen )

Sixth Edition

Maria Andueza (Madrid)
Rui Costa (Lisbon)
Deborah Kapchan (New York)
Brandon LaBelle (Berlin)
Ana Pais (Lisbon)
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec (Amsterdam)

Lab: September 30th - October 4th, 2016 / Public Presentation (exhibition): October 5th, 2016

Venues: Boavista Municipal Gallery / Palácio Pancas Palha (Lisbon)

Co-production: EGEAC / Galerias Municipais, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, and Binaural/Nodar

DIRTY EAR Forum is an intensive lab bringing together a range of artists-researchers to explore the use of sound as a material that "collaborates" with the environment and the listener and may operate as a creative platform for developing new methodologies and forms of collective expression. The 6th edition of DIRTY EAR Forum, co-curated by Brandon LaBelle and Ana Pais, is dedicated to the topic "The Performativity of Sound and Affect". Like the experience of sound, affective modes of experience happen invite us to listen to sensitive rhythms, to movements and vibrations, to multiple intensities. Listening and feeling act as an eminently vibro-tactile experience that collapses borders - between bodies and objects, between public and private - that shape our common perception of the world. Sound and affect are performative, they do things: they hit us, they circulate, they act upon us calling for reactions. Such performativity allows us to wonder about how sound and affect condition and potentiate our experience as well as our ways of thinking, perceiving and acting.

the city as object, the interobjective, being rhythmed by place, emplaced, step by step, across surfaces and into depths, the imaginary city.

Installation recording:

( listen )

Fifth Edition

Barby Asante
Brandon LaBelle
Kevin Logan
David Mollin
Hannah Rickhards
Salomé Voegelin

Lab: July 5th - 7th, 2016 / in collaboration with PEER, London

The intensification around questions of political agency and economic justice continues to inflect our contemporary global environments and experiences. A political vocabulary has developed that sounds insidiously, saturating society with fear and condemnation of the other, the weak, the inefficient. Governmental and Corporate bodies play with language, words and voices, as a judiciary and as an emotive act, to determine social acceptance for a divisive politics.

In response, a culture of resistance and protest has emerged in conjunction with grassroots initiatives, local projects, and neighborly exchange aimed at nurturing alternative social and pedagogical structures. Commonality and togetherness, shared economies and group work are actively sought and supported, encouraging greater sensitivity for each other and the plight of others. Such developments also demand a continual rethinking and reimagining of the specific behaviors and languages that define an alternative life: different possibilities and maybe even seeming impossibilities – that which might exist too but which does not yet rise to the surface of the imaginable and thus remains “unreal”, unimportant; unable to make itself count in the organisation of an actual reality.

This edition of the Forum aims to bring together a group of practitioners and thinkers to explore methods of working collectively using sound, voice, text and listening, as well as concepts of audibility and inaudibility, as the basis for renewing a speech that matters.

Part of the Forum will include a one-day performance workshop with the MA Sound Arts from the London College of Communication, UAL, which will expand the closed artistic explorations in a participatory format.

Fourth edition

Israel Martínez (Mexico)
Brandon LaBelle (Berlin)
Annette le Fort (Berlin)
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec (Amsterdam)
Irena Tomazin (Ljubljana)

Working period: November 3 - 7th, 2015 /
in the context of the Sonic Disobedience festival, Ljubljana

For this edition of the Dirty Ear Forum, we worked within the context of the festival to bring in an ongoing process of sited investigation. Each day we developed a particular focus and activity, resulting in a nightly presentation within the festival venue. In particular, we attempted to relate to the apartment blocks surrounding the venue, in the eastern part of the city. Former military housing, the apartment blocks tower behind the venue, creating an interesting and somewhat ambiguous relation between the cultural center and these spaces of daily life. We immediately wondered, what type of relationship residents might have to the venue, and the various cultural events taking place there.

On the final afternoon, staging an intervention in the courtyard of the housing complex, with an invitation to residents to join in holding a note, a single tone, together:

( listen )

Third Edition

Ricarda Denzer (Vienna)
Brandon LaBelle (Bergen)
Ana País (Lisbon)
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec (Bergen)
Alexandre St-Onge (Montréal)
James Webb (Cape Town)

Lab: March 5th - 13th, 2014 / Exhibiton opening: March 13th, 2014

Dirty Ear Forum is an intensive lab between six participating artists-researchers focusing on the topics of sound art and sonic research. Through a dynamic collaborative structure, the Forum aims to query and explore in what ways sound art may operate as a creative platform for developing new forms of collective work. Through the project, questions of co-operation, listening, hospitality, disruption, presence and auditory knowledge are considered, leading to deep dialogue and material experimentation, and resulting in the making of a final installation work.

Sound can be appreciated as a material that evades our ability to physically hold onto it; it moves through an environment and often passes over boundaries to bring into contact different spaces; and in addition, the invisibility of sound contributes to its rather elusive nature, challenging our capacity to describe or define it. These complex qualities of sound are central to sound art as a practice and often lead to works that appear in public space, and in marginal locations, that are extremely unfixed and mobile, and that also seek out a diversity of publics. The Forum poses sound as a phenomenon that "collaborates" with its environment, and with the listener, making it more a collective event than a private one. In this way, sound can be investigated as an extremely dynamic medium for artistic work, one that may specifically offer opportunities for creating unexpected forms of social, relational and collaborative practice.

If sound art is an "art of listening", in what ways do particular sounds locate us as listeners? How might sound art challenge or unsettle the prevailing dominance of "ocular knowledge" within the arts? And is it possible to develop sound as a means for promoting new theories of the senses, or as a base for multiplying possibilities of dialogic exchange and inclusion?

The intensive lab resulted in an exhibition presented at Rom8, Bergen, March 13th - 16th, 2014. The exhibition materialized the various strands of experimentation developed during the lab, and sought to utilize the space as an active element: spatial displacements, amplifications, and mappings functioned to elaborate a sonic experience that could also unsettle notions of the object.

We looked outside, onto the street, then behind walls, and further, upstairs, down the corridors, bringing them into contact.

Test recording:

( listen )

Second Edition

Presentations and Performances by
Claudia Firth / Lucia Farinati & students of the Nordic Sound Art program
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
David Toop
Binaura / Agoston Nagy
Johnny Herbert
Brandon LaBelle

Experiences of listening often lead to confrontations and encounters with noises and other disturbances, as well as that of intimate sharing and assurance. How often we seek out familiar music, a quiet place, a comforting rhythm in moments of distress. And what of the excitement and intensity found in turning up the volume, repeating a particular expression, exploring the foreign or the mysterious as a break onto the familiar – such modulations of comfort zones encourage a tuning in to the broader horizon of experience.

These emotional borders are activated by a listening sensibility, allowing for a diversity of social contact, which might also provide us with material for types of practice. The Forum aims to focus on listening as a practice, questioning in what ways it participates in social life and cultural work. Presentations by sound artists and theorists in the afternoon seminar will provide entry into this territory of the auditory. This will be followed by an evening of performances, creating a space of listening that may equally enrich our appreciation for the poetics and politics of sound's diverse movements.

Held at Bergen Academy of Art and Design / Bergen Kunsthall.

First Edition

Dirty Ear Forum focuses on contemporary sound culture and sonic practices as an expanded framework for rethinking knowledge structures and creative strategies, spatial demarcations and bodily identities, and for exploring modes of radical listening.

Bringing together leading international artists and researchers, the Forum is developed through an intensive workshop and aims to integrate diverse sonic methodologies and strategies of listening. It is the intention of the workshop to map out the auditory as a platform by which to imagine routes in and around the intensities of global culture. To figure a politics of the senses and the sensible.

Currents in sonic culture and audible practices have emerged as important intersections of research and production, creating a highly active territory by which to engage issues of citizenry and representation, technology and the sensate, ecology and the inter-species, immaterial economy and the transnational. The primary animations of the audible have come to reveal a paradigmatic frame for agitating disciplinary borders and tuning us toward a post-humanistic commons.

Dirty Ear Forum aims to map such a commons by putting into proximity the personal and the collective, the intimate and the global, resulting in a collective sound work distributed through the gallery space.

Zeynep Bulut
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Ole Frahm
Anja Kanngieser
Brandon LaBelle
Anna Raimondo
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec
Åsa Stjerna

We thought to enact a form of coming together, where each can express their individual voice while also contribute to the sharing of ideas, searching for resonances and amplifications.

Workshop period: January 18th - 26th, 2013
Exhibition: January 27th - February 3rd
at
Errant Bodies
Kollwitzstrasse 97
10435 Berlin

Room recording:

( listen )