Dirty Ear Forum

https://www.errantbodies.org/dirty-ear-forum

The Dirty Ear Forum is an experimental platform for sonic research and practices, and aims to position sound as a conceptual framework that allows for experimental modes of collective work. Launched in 2013 in Berlin, the Forum is a mobile project taking place in different locations and settings, and is based on bringing together groups of practitioners to share and develop research on sound and listening. Central to the Forum is a focus on moving from singular creation to collective work, developing a common space from which a set of sonic concepts can be investigated. This includes an engagement with new methodologies in fieldwork, experiments in sonic production, and reflections on questions of collaboration, community, horizontality and sharing. By bringing together individual viewpoints and practices into a shared activity, emphasis is placed on how sound and listening may enable the crafting of an ethics of encounter central to common life. Each Forum is guided by collective decision-making and self-organizing principles, and aims to enrich understandings of sound as an artistic as well as social medium.

Conceptually, the Forum poses sound as a material that allows us to rethink and reshape constructs of embodiment and sovereignty. It highlights the ways in which sound, and an auditory paradigm, challenges static form, and expressions of an independent self, leading to more interpersonal and emergent experiences; how it moves through an environment to often trespass boundaries, fostering new linkages and encounters; and how the invisibility of sound may provide a means for unsettling assumptions around presence and agency. Sound is explored instead as a matter that collaborates with its environment and which may foster multiplicity.