Acoustic Manifesto in Opposition to 100 Years of Glorifying Noise
Press Information
Thursay, 19 February 2009
Acoustic City Responds to Marinetti in Le Figaro
In the history of (acoustic) art, February 20, 2009 isn’t just any old day. It’s the 100th anniversary of Futurism. The front page of the February 20, 1909 issue of Le Figaro featured Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, an aggressive panegyric to progress and violence. What initially might come across as the passionate, provocative screed of a youth hopped up on postpubescece turns out in retrospect to have been one of the intellectual cornerstones and harbingers of fascism.
“A racing car with its hood adorned by great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring automobile that seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace,” is one of the most memorable passages in this seminal document of European intellectual history. Its author—despite a brief ideological dalliance with the extreme Left in the 1920s—made it all the way to Minister of Culture in the Mussolini Regime and was given a state funeral following his death in 1944.
“With the Futurist Manifesto came not only worship of warfare, machinery and furious, raging progress; it also brought the glorification of noise into the world,” said Peter Androsch, Linz09’s director of music. “As part of Acoustic City, our central project, we’re taking the 100th anniversary of Marinetti’s journalistic act of violence as a fitting occasion to finally respond to it in the form of the Acoustic Manifesto.” After all: “Today, it’s a sad fact of life that the world is suffering from all that Marinetti held to be so splendid—war, the noise of machinery, the din of traffic, and the absurdly intensified mobility and acceleration of the rhythms of our life.”
“Since Le Figaro, a French journalistic institution, still exists, this is precisely where we want to publish the Acoustic Manifesto too,” explained Androsch, the man responsible for the document. “Here is a radical abstract of Acoustic City’s mission: FOR a politicization of acoustic space, AGAINST the permanent degradation and manipulation of human beings via inescapable noise pollution, the acoustic unconsciousness of architecture, spatial planning and urban planning, and the racket the permeates our public sphere.”
