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Navigating Noise means getting off the beaten track in order
to find, or rather, to create something new. This publication
is the result of such unconventional navigations, which follow
the track of noise on its path across art, science, and the
humanities. The point of departure is the artwork Navigating
Noise by Kerstin Ergenzinger. This ephemeral, somewhat
out-worldly sound installation provides the framework for a
collection of academic and artistic contributions that address
the need for alternative means of orientation to deal with noise
and to understand and (re)establish our unstable position within
a highly technologized, mediated, and globalized reality.
These navigations cover a broad terrain of research: from
the starry skies to the deep oceans, from the ice cores of
Greenland to sonic navigation in the animal kingdom, from
spatial acoustics in World War I to noise music. Through a
multidisciplinary approach, Navigating Noise paves the way for
unexpected connections between research domains located
at the border of knowing and not knowing. This endeavour
tries to dig through and below existing semantic and epistemic
systems. The contributors scrutinize the binary dichotomies
of noise/information, noise/meaning, and noise/silence in order
to reconfigure the relational framework that is constituted by
these dichotomies. Released from this, noise no longer serves
as the unwanted, semantic-free, and inefficient antithesis
that should be discarded, but rather embodies a dynamic,
unpredictable, yet constitutive force with which we can soar
towards more agile forms of sonic sense production. Noise
is the dynamic condition of the possibility for any form of
meaning. It is through the navigation of noise that we are -
figuratively speaking - able to ´know´.

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