Noise City Radio combines the location and classification of all noise complaints logged in New York City’s 311 system and combines it with audio recordings of noise. Through the app, listeners can experience the spaces of noise complaints by tuning-in as they walk through city streets. The app uses the listener’s location to look-up nearby sound complaints, i.e. all the geotagged records that are within 100ft – anything that should be within earshot. The listener will hear a mix of recorded sounds from Manhattan and field recordings that others have made documenting their environment. Each sound clip matches the category of the noise complaint registered to the listener’s location. The red circle on-screen changes thickness depending on the density of noise complaint records within the space that the listener traverses.

The inspiration for this project is New York City’s War on Noise. This war started in the 1930′s with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s “War on Noise” and has continued through to today with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “Operation Silent Night”. an attempt to “protect the sensitive and the infirm from the ravages of urban din” has today become the systematic identification and decimation of quality of life compromising noise.

In “The War on Noise: Sound and Space in La Guardia’s New York”, Lilian Radovac describes the controversial methods of early noise abatement that has echoed down the years. Since the beginning of city sonic sanitation, the argument to protect “vulnerable residents” most often meant the protection of “the fragile upper class” from their perceptions of the unruly urban masses.

Tuning in to Contested Acoustic Spaces with Noise City Radio | vis: Christo de Klerk

There is a history of contested methods for noise abatement in New York City. Radovac describes how The Noise Abatement Commission of 1929-1932 used technical methods to identify sources of noise and made material and design recommendations to abate it. This contrasted with later methods “framed noise not only as a behavioral or technological problem but also as a symptom and even a cause of urban disorder.” Radovac argues that this latter method has dominated the City’s approach to noise abatement through to today and that it is problematic because it has “conflated the everyday annoyances of city life with criminal acts.”

Noise Complaints Reported in 2010-2011 | src: NYC Open Data, vis: Christo de Klerk

Today’s noise complaints are logged through the City’s 311 system and made available to the public through NYC Open Data. Over 191 thousand noise complaints were logged by the City in 2010 and 2011.

Our attempt in this project is the production of a critical radio that draws sensorial attention to the environment of noise complaints. The radio scans the frequencies of complaints only as the listener walks. As the listener changes location, new sounds and combination of sounds are generated. No path through the city will generate the same soundtrack. The acute awareness of location in transmission frequencies draws the listener to get involved with the drama, to search out with the fullness of the body the social, technological, and urban design tensions that is within their midst.

In contested sonic spaces, urban design shares responsibility with the biological and mechanical generators of noise. That sources of noise appropriate and extend through the material environment make them all the more abhorrent – vibrating the ground, piercing through the  windows, and amplifying against the walls. Noise possesses the city, obscuring the source and even rendering it mute. The imperceptible resonance from a power station in Queens is locatable in every window that rattles. The project reveals how the City flattens the dimensionality of complaints into mappable coordinates in order to operationalize abatement. Within this flattening are critical transformations, clearly perceived by the listener walking the street. The points of complaints don’t necessarily reflect the location or source of the noise. Rather, they pinpoint the agitated spaces, the places where people were upset.

We spent some time trying to figure out which form to remediate in this project. We selected the radio partly because it was one of the sources of the earliest complaints in New York City. Also, we were inspired to reflect on these locations as producers of illegal short range transmissions. The app therefore would be a kind of receiver that picks up the frequencies of illegal transmissions. The project may even come to generate new audio complaints. Hooked up to a boombox, the noise complaints system can start to generate new noise complaints – a form of audio feedback on the audio surveillance network.

by Christo de Klerk and Lara Heintz

Sources + Inspiration

“311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present.” NYC Open Data, n.d. http://nycopendata.socrata.com/.

Cory, Mark E. “Sound Play: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art.” In Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1992.

Mattern, Shannon C. “Radio City: Sound, Space & The City.” Words in Space, February 15, 2011. http://www.wordsinspace.net/wordpress/2012/02/15/radio-city-sound-space-the-city/.

Radovac, Lilian. “The ‘War on Noise’: Sound and Space in La Guardia’s New York.” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (September 15, 2011): 733–760.

On this definition Gene Youngblood launches his idea of synaesthetic cinema in his 1970 book, Expanded Cinema. The idea of a synaesthetic film with its images transforming continuously into other images for perceptual rather than dramatic effect makes me think of the Deerhunter Helicopter or Panda Bear & Pedro Maia Memory music videos. Distinct from narrative cinema, synaesthetic cinema is meant to be evocative rather than expository. A place between desire and experience, where an experience is being created. Synergetic in that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In narrative cinema the individual parts dominate the whole.

Youngblood’s most instructive examples of a synaesthetic cinema is Michael Snow Wavelength (1967) and Stan Brakhage Dog Star Man (1961). A severed sense is evoked. A feeling that does not need drama to be wound tight the chest. A sense from deep sleep. As Brakhage puts it, perhaps it is that “world before the beginning was the word”. As if over an ocean. Hovering. A place of synergy where change becomes increasingly likely.”Oceanic consciousness … that in which we feel our individual existence lost in mystic union with the universe.”

And so Youngblood moves on to polymorphic eroticism, of sexual consciousness that rides the rhythms of the waves without particularity or boundary, but of the feeling and the mystical unity of the whole. The criticism of eroticism in contemporary film is accurate. “Hollywood movies are teasers whose eroticism is a result of psychological conditioning that is not, fundamentally, the enjoyment of sex itself.” Hollywood reinforces puritanical notions of sexuality by how “they represent sex in various stages of ‘unredemption’ until the point of watching them becomes more an act of rebellion, of something ‘dirty,’ clandestine, without redeeming qualities, than the enjoyment of sex.”

But I’m not willing to give up narrative. Is not reconciling narrative cinema with synaesthetic cinema an act of synthesis in itself? I want to leave earth and the city for the ocean, for the seaside town, or the space station – worlds at the edge of the ocean – in order to return. In Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the cosmic ocean is a mirror of the city. Ebbs. Flows. The space between the reflection is the place, the space station. A rough sleep awoken by the cross shaped flare of its beacon. A sacred space of contemplation suspended between the worlds.

A deep sleep on board the station. Awake in the warm glow of the cosmic drone. The appearance of a woman passed away and still in memory.

Sartorius: So, as far as I can tell, they are constructed… While our structure is made of atoms, theirs consists of neutrinos. They seem to be stablized by Solaris’ force field. You’ve got a superb specimen.

Kris: That’s my wife.

Sartorius: Then take a blood sample from your wife.

Kris: Why?

Sartorius: It’ll sober you up a bit. … Are you qualified to perform an autopsy?

Kris: I’ve already told you – she’s my wife. Don’t you understand? It would be like cutting my own leg off.

Where Youngblood emphasizes the turn from the absolute for the unrealized order of chaos, Tarkovsky emphasizes the yearning for the absolute: “Aspiration towards the absolute is the moving force in the development of mankind.” Perhaps it is a matter of posture. Or a resignation. A resignation that carries forward the pleasures and also the pain.

Alhazen was asked to build a dam on the Nile in the 11th Century by the vindictive and ruthless caliph al-Hakim. In surveying the selected site, Alhazen determined that the project was impossible. To avoid punishment for his failure in damming the Nile under al-Hakim, Alhazen pretended to have gone mad. In consequence, he entered a productive period of scholarship under his subsequent house arrest. So the story goes.

Yet, one wonders whether Alhazen, the scholar that first proved light does not come out of the eyes, had not declined the project upon a political insight. Control of the Nile’s annual flooding would have contributed a political stability to al-Hakim’s regime, strengthening his position against the rulers of Baghdad and Bahrain – neighbors for whom he reserved an antagonistic sentiment.

“He who controlled the annual agricultural surplus exercised the powers of life and death over his neighbors. That artificial creation of scarcity in the midst of increasing natural abundance was one of the first characteristics of the new economy of civilized exploitation: an economy profoundly contrary to the mores of the village,” writes Lewis Mumford.

Near the site that Alhazen surveyed along the Nile in the 11th Century sits today the Aswan High Dam completed in 1971. It was a project that consolidated power for Egypt’s government from foreign intervention after the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. A lotus flower shaped monument extols the role of cordial Soviet-Egyptian collaboration in the construction of the dam, ignoring the less than cordial expulsion of the Soviets shortly after the completion of the project. The monument also ignores the contribution of American designers and engineers in the planning of the dam.

Aswan High Dam empowered Egypt. It allowed for a greater area of agricultural production in the Nile Delta and accelerated industrialization through hydro generated electricity. Rural communities received electricity and the Nile became easier to navigate. A new era of independently established abundance, the Aswan High Dam became a symbol of sovereignty.

The dam signified the purpose of the revolution. It was the very “appearance of beneficence and helpfulness, sufficient to awaken some degree of affection and trust and loyalty” that Mumford stipulates as a requirement for a centralized governing authority. With the Nile under control, the exploding Nubian population brings an implosion of human energy – all subject to those who control the landscape

As Mumford explains, in the past religion would have played a role as important as brute force in the consolidation of power. The synthesis of religion and power would be established in the temple and the citadel. No surprise then to find that the ancient Egyptian god of flooding was worshiped at Aswan, near the present location of the Aswan High Dam. The temple priests regulating the waters with their prayers.

The dam is a wall against the waters. Mumford writes, the “first use of the wall may have been a religious one: to define the sacred limits of the temenos, and to keep at bay evil spirits rather than inimical men.” At the boundary of the sacred Nile valley is a mechanical wall, the extension of the citadel wall to the frontier temple in Aswan. Exponentially more intensive in its effects, the dam claims absolute control over the river, sending back on the rule of the city – the floodwater and electricity. A wall at the far limits of the city, operated and maintained under a symbol of labor’s cooperation.

Ours is an age of a multitude of socially undirected technical advances, divorced from any other ends than the advancement of science and technology. We live in fact in an exploding universe of mechanical and electronic invention, whose parts are moving at a rapid pace ever further and further away from their human center, and from any rational, autonomous human purposes.

It is hard to see today’s technical advances anchored to anything other than a human center. While consumerism seems to secure the human end of technical advancement, it is the production process that seems far less human orientated. Technical advancement in information technology is guided by engaging human applications, but the production and disposal of every i-device comes with stories of the human expense: whether factory conditions of Foxconn or the e-waste situation in Asia and Africa. Delivering and powering these products of invention bring further concerns that place infrastructure in the balance with the environment.

It is perhaps the magic of low prices and engaging devices that has shifted concerns about the teleology of technology away from the human to the environment. An effort to pressure technical advancement away from instant gratification to long term sustainability (or, rather, ongoing gratification).

So, is technical advances today more directed toward human ends than in the 20th century? Mumford argues that the first urban revolution involved a myriad of technical advances in agriculture, astronomy, literature, mathematics, and weaponry that exalted humanity, granting excess power to fulfill needs beyond the requirements of survival. And the agency of this revolution was the institution of Kingship. Kings stood at the center of the “urban implosion.”

In the age of the Infrastructural City, who is the king that makes production inhumane?

Who are these rulers that measure their power in “loaves of bread and jugs of beer”? What is the purpose of this quantitative surplus? And why does this particular croissant and this pale ale taste so much better than those?

The kings were wrong. The best bread and beer is made in small batches from whole ingredients by craftsmen.

Borders range from the mundane and invisible to the political and highly visible. In every instance they are projected by humans as having value. A value in defining the here and there, the us and them, the mine and theirs.

Yet the engagement of place through social and locative media is predominantly focused on an engagement characterized by annotating coordinates. We check-in with tags, feelings, and photos. Inscribing into place (and into databases) a very particular sense of space.

But what if place was defined by engagement with its boundaries instead of its middling coordinates? Instead of defining place by check-ins, defining it by crossings in space. Instead of planting flags, drawing the lines that make this a place. How might this change our perception of the meaning of place and of the lines that divide this place from another?

Project Borders is a locative media design research project. It takes a users current and previous location to determine the geo-political boundaries crossed. Users are asked to annotate these boundaries with their perceptions of belonging, happiness, awareness, and sense of security determined by the crossing.

This web app is still under development. Consider it somewhere in pre-beta. Neighborhood boundaries are limited to New York City. Feedback appreciated. And please consider following project borders on Facebook.

QR code to launch project borders on your cell phone:

so masculinity dominated and sadistic rigour took over from easy-paced routine.

advent of masculine gods associated with power. myths of force and aggression.

“Neolithic woman had as much reason to be proud of her contribution as Nuclear Age woman has a reason to be apprehensive over the fate of her children and her world.”

from the power to give life to the power to take life.

the explosion of violence for the explosion of flowers.

the city, bitter fruit.

… the shepherd moved toward the curbing of force and violence and the institution of some measure of justice, through which even the weakest member of the flock might be protected and nurtured.

In the city, the new role of the hunter is the old role of the shepherd. A shepherd to the people. But perhaps it is a choice guided by the limits of imagination. The new role of the hunter could be that of the war lord: his skills transferred from killing animals “to the more highly organized vocation of regimenting or slaughtering other men.”

The self-image of the ruler as shepherd king by no means guarantees a sustainable relationship. The Hyksos, Hammurabi, Dumuzid, David – as kings that identified themselves (or were identified) as shepherds of the people, they did exhibit a varying appetite for blood. David was forbidden to build the temple because he was a warrior that had shed blood.

It is not that the self-image of the ruler as shepherd chastises the violence of the hunter in the community, but rather that it models a poetic possibility. A possibility that enriches relationships rather than stratifies it. Cultural and vocational symbiosis. An uncertain, but sustainable basis for difference, identity, community and survival. The shepherd’s flock fertilizes the the peasant’s fields. The vigilant shepherd roaming the peripheries of the village protect the peasant’s crops and children from the predatory animals preeminently threaten their flock.

If to assert that there is something primordial about this cultural relationship between shepherd and peasant, hunter and villager, paleolithic and neolithic peoples, it is perhaps to suggest we reflect a little longer and more imaginatively about human structures of relationship. To dwell a little longer on Cain and Abel. Cain the peasant farmer tending crops he worked settled land to yield. Abel the shepherd wandering with his flock for the yield of distant lands. Mumford notes that early cave drawings don’t depict hunters hunting humans, only animals. It is with the permanent settlements that the hunters begin in earnest to mobilize and kill people. And so, a little bit of an intriguing mystery: Cain murders his brother Abel. The farmer gets the first taste of blood. Reconciled to God, he is marked a citizen. A builder of cities.

The Villager’s ideal : “to delight in their food, to be proud of their clothes, to be content with their home, to rejoice in their customs.”

In India, only the village is described as permanent. It survives. It endures.

“Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down. Revolution succeeds to revolution. Hindoo, Pathan, Mogul, Maharatha, Sikh, English, are all masters in turn but the village communities remain the same. In times of trouble they arm and fortify themselves. A hostile army passes through the country. The village communities collect their little cattle within their walls and let the enemy pass unprovoked.” – Charles Metcalfe

But the permanent feature in the country needs reform.

“What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?” – B. R. Ambedkar.

Backwater and fundamental. Mired in memory as it is “preserved in Polish swamps, Swiss lake bottoms, Egyptian delta mud.”

The contribution of the village to the history of any structure is typically exaggerated. In China, the village becomes part of the myth of a peasant uprising and revolution. But in India, the village is the cause for a concerted effort of constitutional reform.

In Ugetsu (1953), the village potter clearly delights in food and clothes. He wants to give his wife the best, but he is poor. Certainly it is arguable that he wants this as a means to affirm his manliness. Yet, he is earnest. The hyper inflated prices of war time give him an opportunity to sell his wares at great profit. So he takes the chance; takes a shipment of his goods to the city. An opportunity, albeit scorned by the village chief: rebuking wealth made in war for its ephemerality.

The delight of the villager is his dreams. But the profits made in the war overcome reality with ghostly phantasms that point back: not to the village as a refuge laden with the goodness of moral fortitude, but the village as ruin. An object possessed by his possession. To break the spell, a priest appears in the potter’s path. He inscribes prayers on to the potter’s body. By carrying these the haunting visions that keep him captive are released, but the reality of what has happened remains: his family and the village are consumed by the ravages of war.

Going forward is to carry. A father carrying a child alone. Perhaps with the help of the village remnant.

What will it take to raise this child?
A village. Maybe.
A single parent with the prayers inscribed on his body and the spirit of his wife by his side. Maybe.

Quite curious really: that the “male parent” needed to fertilize the “ovum” of the village form. The genetic metaphor: the need for “a whole set of complementary chromosomes”. A mash mash mash of structured sets of information from different sources: muddled visions of un-had memories of the distant villages included.

Under woman’s dominance, the neolithic period is pre-eminently one of containers: it is an age of stone and pottery utensils, of vases, jars, vats, cisterns, bins, barns, granaries, houses, not least great collective containers like irrigation ditches and villages.

I recall the jars of Cambodia. These large cisterns of water. In villages. At bus stops. Along the road in front of every rural home.

A storage unit for a quantity of water.

As memorable as the stupas.

A storage unit for memory.

Containers and the mechanisms for filling them. Store and withdraw.

Taming the ebbs and flows of water, enduring the time between harvests.

Reading Kurt Danziger’s “Marking the Mind” I’m encouraged to think there is a parallel here with the domestication of memory. Like food and water, ” memory is marked by a certain degrees of resistance or even recalcitrance. It does not automatically do what one would like or expect it to. It plays tricks on one, refuses its help when one needs it, distorts and decays.” It spoils. It evaporates.

“Can it be tamed?” And so might begin a long history using the “storage metaphor” to understand memory. Leading up to today. Where even the bureaucrats unholy rule is tamed by well designed forms, intelligent processes, an available support community -  enfolding assurance of the task in the clarity of the form field to be filled. Feeling of fortitude in a barn filled with the harvest. Clarity in the task to fill it. Even death’s sting can be mitigated by carving out a place in the knoll unto which you may promise yourself, entombed in a burial jar.

Physically permanent and socially continuous, the city betrays the experience of life as passing and uncertain. Lewis Mumford finds the source of the city’s permanence and continuity in the establishment of the village. Village life gave its inhabitants a sense of stability. From soil to seed to harvest, farming requires permanence and an interest in reproduction. For Mumford, the neolithic agricultural revolution was also, if not predated by, a sexual revolution where the nurturing role of women comes to the fore and men’s aggressive nature recedes.

The village, in the midst of its garden plots and fields, formed a new kind of settlement: a permanent association of families and neighbors, of birds and animals, of houses and storage pits and barns, all rooted in the ancestral soil, in which each generation formed the compost for the next.

At the idyllic center of urban history is the primordial village. With its harmonious symbiosis in human and animal relationships. With its grounded provision to human structures – those agrarian homes, storage pits, and barns. Even waste is valued enough to transfer from generation to generation.

Yet, how many of these villages without even the threat of war were erased by famine, floods, or disease? Or crops plundered by pests and wild animals? Hardly permanent. Barely continuous. In our neighborhoods and in the country we might see the ancient village, its social form transmitted, its physical form enduring. The transmitted pattern received and recognized, but upon what grounds understood?

The ground was the first surface of erasable inscription. The surface upon which to work out, to plow out, to store, to bury, to find the self in – the first personal medium of erasable inscription. The village becomes a figure written in the soil, an erasable word etched in manure and clay. Adam’s cursed medium. Not so much cursed for its erasability but for its thorns and thistles.

Figuring human relations against the prickliness of memory through the ages is the picture presence of the village. It represents the protest: of the possibility of a life by intentional association, of negotiated protocols, and of a shared burden under the cursed medium.

It is easy to criticize Mumford’s picturesque village. How could domestication ever be negotiated equitably? How could it be right from the start? How could it be good at all?

It is something, because it is still recognizable amid the sprawl, the towers, the pavement, and all the dirt. Still seen. Through the overgrown brush of the medium we recognize its outline.

Without this communal identification and mothering, the young become demoralized: indeed, their very power to become fully human may vanish, along with neolithic man’s first obligation – the cherishing and nurturing of life.

Still working to improve the cursed medium for a better glimpse of the fullness of and the wanting for our togetherness.