Curating Noise? The paradox of taking care of the experimental margins of artistic practices. The self-denomination of Noise, however reluctantly adopted by some operating on the experimental fringe of sound, implies a paradox: it signals the refusal to communicate. Noise, as a term, is thus first and foremost emblematic. While refusing to communicate, the self-denomination as Noise acts as an emblazoned shield, brandishing the paradox of simultaneous offense and retreat: retreat from semantic, social, commercial norms, and offense, if not in the military sense of an organised campaign, then in the sense of Avant Garde, more familiar to artistic practices: an offense in reclaiming territory lost to an enemy. What is this ground that is recovered by undoing the constraints of established culture in general and even of music as a category? Now, if the hypothetical enemy of Noise is all that corrals and constraints, how are we to conceive of the role of a curator in relation to Noise? What does it mean to care for the creative margins of what is acceptable according to cultural conventions? How does the curator of Noise avoid the self-defeating logic of bringing in from the cold those who chose to retreat from institutional sanction, and to appease those who chose to take the offensive? In this talk I will stress-test the paradoxical commitment to curate and care for Noise, by rethinking Gilbert Simondon’s ideas of dis-adaptation and reverse alienation as creative strategies. -- Cécile Malaspina is directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, and Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. She is the author of An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury 2018) and principal translator of Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Minnesota University Press 2017). She completed her PhD in Philosophy, Epistemology and History of Science and Technology at Paris 8 Denis Diderot, under the supervision of Alain Leplège and Iain Hamilton Grant, and obtained her MA in Contemporary French Philosophy & Critical Theory from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), UK. For more information see: https://sfsia.art/2021-sonsbeek/
