With six editions already, Dirty Ear Forum is a project of Errant Bodies dedicated to explore sound studies and sound art in contemporary processes, embracing the multiplicity of sound’s practical and theoretical perspectives.
“In particular, the project aims to pose sound as a material that allows us to rethink modes of collective work. It considers how sound evades our ability to physically hold onto it, how it moves through an environment and often passes over boundaries, and in addition, how the invisibility of sound unsettles assumptions around presence and linguistic signification. These dynamic qualities of sound are central to sound art as a practice, and often leads to works that appear in unlikely spaces, that are extremely unfixed and mobile, and that seek out a diversity of publics. It is the basis of the Forum to approach sound as a material that “collaborates” with its environment and the listener, making it more a collective open event rather than a private one. The Dirty Ear Forum sets out to investigate these viewpoints by bringing together a range of artists-researchers to work collectively. This includes an engagement with related discourses as well as creative expressions and new methodologies.
Currents in sonic culture and sounding practices have emerged as a generative platform by which to approach issues of citizenry and representation, technology and the sensate, ecology and animal work, immaterial economies and the transnational. The primary animations of the audible have come to reveal a paradigmatic frame for agitating disciplinary borders and tuning us toward forms of commoning and civic imagination.”
In their official site you can find some documentation about their previous events, as well as two interesting text reports, available for download in PDF although also published in physical form through various platforms, such Amazon (1 / 2).
Report #1 includes Zeynep Bulut, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Ole Frahm, Anja Kanngieser, Brandon LaBelle, Anna Raimondo, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec and Åsa Stjerna. Report #2 includes texts by Ricarda Denzer, Claudia Firth, Lucia Farinati, Brandon LaBelle, Ana Pais, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, Alexandre St-Onge and James Webb are included.
