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Specifically sound: critical pedagogy and the sound art practice of Ultra-red

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Content SPECIFICALLY SOUND:

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE SOUND ART PRACTICE OF ULTRA-RED

by

Katherine Bray

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
ART AND CURATORIAL PRACTICE IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

May 2013

Copyright 2013 Katherine Bray

ii
Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Connie Butler, my Thesis Committee Chair, and to John Tain, and Robby
Herbst, my committee readers, for your time, thoughts, and generative responses. I feel
extremely fortunate to have benefited from your generous insight and support.

Thanks also to Noura Wedell, to Rhea Anastas, our MA Program Director, as well as to the
Roski MA faculty and my classmates for helping me form this project into a venue for
researching ideas and trying out new ones.

My sincere gratitude goes to the organizing team of The School of Echoes, Los Angeles. Thank
you for inviting me to be a part of an invaluable experience that I know I will continue to think
about far beyond the limits of this project.

Finally, I owe deep thanks to Arthur, my fiancé, for your loving patience, intellectual
enthusiasm, and your cooking for me while I worked!

iii
Abstract

Ultra-red is a contemporary sound art collective of twelve internationally-based artists and social
justice organizers. Founded in 1994 during the AIDS crisis, Ultra-red’s activist sound art practice
coalesced in the audio-documentation of a hypodermic needle exchange on the streets of Los
Angeles. In 1997, Ultra-red joined Union de Vecinos, an L.A.-based organization of public
housing residents, in the fight to prevent the Federally subsided demolition of their housing
community, Aliso Village, in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of L.A. Core to Union de
Vecinos’ conception of organizing is Brazilian literacy educator Paulo Freire’s theory of critical
pedagogy, which conceives of organizing as a socially embedded, participatory alternative to
conventional, hierarchical educational models. Ultra-red adopted Freire’s critical pedagogy as a
framework for embedding their sound art practice in an ongoing investigation of the role of
aesthetics in activist work. This thesis draws from precursors in the history of sound, such as
John Cage’s 4’33” (1952), Pierre Schaeffer’s objet sonore, R. Murray Schafer’s acoustic
ecology, and Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening, and from Freire’s critical pedagogy to analyze
Ultra-red’s hybrid social justice and artistic practice.

iv
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii

Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1

Chapter 1: Ultra-red .........................................................................................................................6
1.1 Sound Art as Activist Practice (1994 - 1997) ................................................................7
1.2 Ultra-red and Union de Vecinos (1997 - 2001) ...........................................................13
1.3 SILENT|LISTEN: Protocol as Form (2005 - 2009) ....................................................21
1.4 The School of Echoes (2009 - the present) ..................................................................24

Chapter 2: Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy .................................................................................28
2.1 Freire’s Codifications: aesthetic objects for critical reflection ...................................32

Chapter 3: Specifically Sound .......................................................................................................35
3.1 Ambiance as Thematic Universe ................................................................................41
3.2 Coding and Decoding Sounds as Objects ....................................................................42
3.3 Panaurality within the Critical Pedagogical Frame .....................................................44
3.4 Silence .........................................................................................................................46

Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................49

Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................51

1
Introduction

On a drizzly evening in the Fall of 2012, roughly thirty artists, community
activists, non-profit leaders, preservationists, and university students gathered at Self
Help Graphics and Art, a non-profit arts center serving the historically Latino community
of the Boyle Heights neighborhood. The agenda for this public meeting, titled “How Can
Artists and the Eastside Generate Change Together,” was a presentation and discussion
on an impending Arts District designation of a section of 1
st
Street.
1
The programmed
panelists included staff and board representatives of the Self Help Graphics and Art
organization in dialogue with L.A. based members of international sound-art collective,
Ultra-red. Two of the three Ultra-red representatives, Elizabeth Blaney and Leonardo
Vilchis, work as co-directors of the tenants’ rights organization, Union de Vecinos,
whose Boyle Heights headquarters was mere blocks away. Dont Rhine, co-founder of
Ultra-red, would facilitate the panel and following discussion with the audience.
We took our seats in the concentric circles of folding chairs amidst the drafty
warehouse space and introduced ourselves as the microphone was passed around the
room. When the microphone returned to Dont, he invited the audience to one minute of
silence. He asked that during this minute, we might listen to the space, and in that
listening, contemplate its history and its relationship to the neighborhood beyond.
Through the wide-open garage door I heard soft rainfall, the traffic on 1
st
Street,
and the footfall of pedestrians passing on the sidewalk. These sounds appeared rather

1
“How Can Artists and the Eastside Generate Change Together” was organized by the Los
Angeles-based media arts non-profit, Freewaves, as part of a series of public discussions addressing social
practice in Los Angeles. Los Angeles-based media arts non-profit, Freewaves, as part of a series of public
discussions addressing social practice. See Freewaves’s website, www.freewaves.org, for audio
documentation of the series.

2
mundane, if not pleasant to pause and appreciate. I recognized, however, that in this
context, Dont was asking us to perform the kind of listening proposed in John Cage’s
4’33” (1952). By drafting a score in which a performer, seated at a piano, proceeds to
play nothing for just over four and one half minutes, Cage’s composition proposed a
reconceptualization of what constitutes aesthetically significant sound. Aesthetic
qualities of the moment’s ambiance noted, I reflected upon these sounds within the site-
specific frame posed by our facilitator’s prompt. This being my first visit, I realized I
knew very little about Self Help Graphics apart from a vague notion of its mission. What
I did know of the neighborhood was its long-fought struggle with gang violence, and its
ongoing struggles with poverty and displacement since the early-1990s. I was startled
then by the metallic churning of the oncoming 1
st
St. Gold Line train, which broadcast a
tinny warning chime as it approached a stoplight. The train’s abrupt and clamorous
arrival punctuated the quiet, and Dont called, “Time.”
As the panelists’ views on the role of artists in neighborhood change-making
unfolded, I came to understand the intent of Dont’s opening gesture. I learned that Self
Help Graphics, established in the mid-1970s as a community print shop in the
economically depressed Boyle Heights neighborhood, had nearly folded in the early
2000s when it was displaced from its original location by rising rent costs.
2
The
organization adapted itself to a sales- and service-based revenue model, and in
partnership with the now-dissolved Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of
Los Angeles, was relaunched in 2011 at its new 1
st
St. address.
3
In her talk, Self Help
Graphics’ Director, Evonne Gallardo embraced the Arts District designation, remarking

2
Evonne Gallardo, (panel discussion, “How Can Artists and the Eastside Generate Change
Together,” panel discussion, Self Help Graphics, Los Angeles, CA, November 17, 2012).
3
Evonne Gallardo, email correspondence with the author, March 1, 2013.

3
several times that she regarded artists as “part of community,” rather than “in binary
opposition to community.” The Ultra-red / Union de Vecinos panelists, meanwhile,
expressed a more hesitant take on the Arts District designation. Whom, they asked,
would the Arts District, along with the billions of dollars in public investment following
the construction of the Gold Line, benefit? It became clear to me that while the Arts
District presented an opportunity for organizational growth to Self Help Graphics, it
promised continued gentrifying pressure and displacement for the Union de Vecinos
constituency. The strident approach of the new light rail train, heard moments before,
became weighty with significance; the train’s arrival may signify the forced departure of
the very communities who crafted the unique cultural character that makes Boyle Heights
a destination. Accordingly, it appeared that Gallardo’s delineation of the Self Help
Graphics “artist-as-community” constituency contained a contradiction in terms.
When the evening’s discussion was opened to the audience, Dont invited us to
respond to each other’s remarks specifically by answering the question, “What did you
hear?” After each turn with the microphone, Dont reiterated the question: What did you
hear? For me, the repetition of the question reframed listening into an active state. I
began to hear past my own assumptions about what people were saying, toward how they
were saying it. Heard in this way, the terms of this debate were revealed to be quite
confused between speakers in the room. It seemed that when one person finished a
comment about artists needing support in career advancement, the next speaker
substituted “artist” for “entrepreneur.” For one person, “community member” meant
anyone living or working within the geographic boundaries of the neighborhood, while to
another, “community” meant the majority of families in Boyle Heights living on $33,000

4
or less annually. For some, “developers” were the villain, for others, “developers” were
the heroes, while for still some others, “developer” and “artist” became conflated as one
in the same entity. I was reminded by the thorny contradictions bound up in the question
of art’s role in processes of gentrification, but more importantly, I came away with a new
appreciation for the concrete qualities of the debate: undefined terms, straw-men,
inherited wisdom, and asymmetrical representation of class.
By reframing the gentrification debate as a dynamic of discourse impacted by
material conditions of those represented, and not represented in the room, Ultra-red was
enacting the kind of reflexive criticality demanded by Paulo Freire’s unique critical
pedagogical methodology. Distinct from traditional notions of knowledge and teaching,
Freire’s pedagogy is conceived as a mode of community self-organizing in which
participants draw on the familiar experience of their own everyday conditions to engage
in a collective investigation into the causes and manifestations of oppression. Ultra-red’s
utilization of Freire’s critical pedagogy as a strategy for artistic practice proposes a
radical shift in the collaborative dynamic of activist art. While the artist-as-activist is
typically expected to render an emancipatory artistic message or gesture on behalf of
oppressed communities, the artist-as-organizer of a critical pedagogical process becomes
a facilitator who works alongside communities as they build a self-aware process for
analyzing their conditions and authoring change on their own terms. In this construct,
artists and their work are not accountable to the institution of art, but rather to the specific
community-organizing context in which they are embedded.
Setting out to gain access to Ultra-red’s process, and to research their history, I
began participating in a newly formed critical pedagogy project initiated here in Los

5
Angeles called The School of Echoes, L.A. (SOELA). While I recognized many of the
conceptual and logistical questions germane to SOELA as belonging to the familiar
discursive terrain of socially engaged art, I found that I lacked the vocabulary and art
historical knowledge to analyze aesthetic and conceptual aspects of the project that were
clearly rooted in discourses of sound. To put it simply, I wanted to understand what it
was about sound that was so significant for Ultra-red, especially when so many so-called
“social practices” with similar social justice goals and collaborative working strategies
have abandoned alignment with any specific medium.
Toward exploring this question, I first lay out the founding and development of
the Ultra-red collective and their artistic practice as one rooted in electro-acoustic music
and evolving into its present-day iteration: a hybrid, multi-site practice applying sound-
art within a critical pedagogical project. Next, I detail the role of aesthetics in critical
pedagogy, the 1960s popular educator Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy. Finally, I offer a
reading of Ultra-red’s deployment of audio aesthetics by considering sound-based
concepts of ambiance, abstraction, panaurality, dialogue, and silence within the context
of the critical pedagogical process. In conclusion, I find that historical precedents and
theoretical concepts that embrace sociality and politics in sound art mutually reinforce the
goals and strategies of critical pedagogy. The mutual reinforcement of sound and critical
pedagogy found in the practice of Ultra-red proposes a logic for community-accountable
art making.

6
Ultra-red
CHAPTER 1

Activist art has come to signify a particular emphasis on appropriated aesthetic
forms whose political content does the work of both cultural analysis and cultural
action. The art collaboration Ultra-red propose a political-aesthetic project that
reverses this model. If we understand organizing as the formal practices that
build relationships out of which people compose an analysis and strategic
actions, how might art contribute to and challenge those very processes? How
might those processes already constitute aesthetic forms?
- Ultra-red’s mission statement as of 2000, www.ultrared.org

The open-ended questions which conclude Ultra-red’s mission statement
accommodate the changing use of media, practices, and terms of membership that have
characterized the collective’s history since its founding in 1994. The collective itself has
expanded from two Los Angeles-based members to include ten members, whose
locations are dispersed between Los Angeles, New York, London, and Berlin. Each
member deploys Ultra-red’s methodology differently, depending on the various
geographic contexts and social movements with which they are involved.
4
The
multiplicity of localities and discursive contexts represented by Ultra-red’s members has
begotten the spectrum of media forms and presentation contexts that comprise the
collective’s CV: electronic/ambient albums, recordings, a free-use record label, radio
broadcasts, performances, installations, residencies, writings and publications, and
teaching. In nearly two decades working under the moniker “Ultra-red,” the group’s
self-characterization has shifted from “a collective of audio activists,”
5
to a “political-
aesthetic organization,”
6
to “militant sound investigators,”
7
to most recently, simply “a

4
On Ultra-red’s website, these sites of struggle are listed as: migration, anti-racism, participatory
community development, and the politics of HIV/AIDS. Ultra-red, Mission Statement, accessed on
February 28, 2013, http://www.ultrared.org/mission.html.
5
Mark Fisher, “Public Space is the Place,” The Wire Magazine September 2008: 28.
6
Ibid.

7
research collective.”
8
The common denominator across these reconfigurations has
remained Ultra-red’s conception of their work as sound art.
I offer in this chapter a telling of Ultra-red’s evolution that explores their
conceptual embrace of the medium of sound, as well as the rise of critical pedagogy
within their practice as a framework for situating and understanding aesthetic operations
in organizing contexts. I propose four key moments toward understanding the
collective’s development in these respects: the founding of Ultra-red through
simultaneous artistic and activist activities, Ultra-red’s encounter with critical pedagogy,
integration of critical pedagogy into the practice as an overt aesthetic form, and finally,
their present pedagogical works that inquire into the efficacy of their artistic
methodologies in the context of political organizing efforts.

1.1 Sound Art as Activist Practice (1994 - 1997)
Dont Rhine accounts for his own co-founding membership with Ultra-red in terms
of his experiences as an activist with AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP).
9

Joining ACT UP in Los Angeles in 1989 was, he says, his “coming out” as an activist.
The experience of working with ACT UP was, Rhine explains, all encompassing.
HIV/AIDS, and organizing against its institutional dismissal, permeated his social,
political, intellectual, and professional life. Rhine’s recollections are echoed in Deborah

7
Dont Rhine, “Ultra-red 2011 Annual Report” (unpublished PDF supplied to the author by the
artist), 27.
8
Dont Rhine, (lecture, Art, Politics, and Social Change, Otis College of Art and Design, Los
Angeles, CA, March 27, 2012).
9
Deborah Gould describes ACT UP’s activist strategy: “Through raucous demonstrations, acts of
civil disobedience, zaps and disruptions, die-ins and other forms of street theater, meetings with
government and other officials, and eye-catching agit-prop, ACT UP and similar direct-action AIDS groups
intervened in every aspect of the AIDS epidemic, with tremendous effect.” From Deborah B. Gould,
Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009), 4.

8
B. Gould’s Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS. Through
interviews, and reflection upon her own participation with ACT UP in Chicago, Gould
illuminates ACT UP as an affective universe charged with love, grief, and anger. These
emotions, chiefly anger, she argues, are an underrepresented but critical aspect of the
organizing movement against AIDS.
10
She writes, “During ACT UP’s heyday, we only
had space for anger, for a sense of urgency, for action.”
11
For Rhine, this totalizing
emotional experience of the epidemic demanded “a different kind of art-making.”
12

Seeking an outlet for direct political intervention through community service, Rhine
joined ACT UP L.A.’s Clean Needles Now (CNN). Initiated in 1991 by a small group of
ACT UP members led by artist and activist Renée Edgington, CNN evolved out of an
ACT UP needle exchange committee as a then-clandestine effort to provide intravenous
drug users access to clean needles, thereby abating the spread of life-threatening, blood
borne diseases such as HIV.
13

In “Below the Skin: AIDS Activism and the Art of Clean Needles Now,” Rhine
takes the occasion of CNN’s twentieth anniversary to document the organization’s
history, and to reflect upon the concrete role art played within the overall efficacy of the

10
“Affect. Being affected, being moved. Emotion. Motion. Movement, from the post-classical
Latin movementum, meaning ‘motion,’ and earlier, movimentum, meaning ‘emotion,’ and then later,
‘rebellion,’ or ‘uprising.’ The movement in ‘social movements’ gestures toward the realm of affect; bodily
intensities; emotions, feelings, and passions; and toward uprising.” (Gould, Moving Emotions, 2-3).
11
Gould, Moving Emotions, 9.
12
Dont Rhine, (School of Echoes meeting, Union de Vecinos Maywood Office, Maywood, CA,
December 7,

2012).
13
Based on a philosophy of “harm reduction,” “working to reduce the harms related to drug use
without necessarily reducing the consumption of drugs,” needle exchanges are on-the-ground health
programs that work to increase awareness of and access to safe injection practices and equipment. The first
needle exchange programs are said to have originated in New York in the 1980’s, as a response to the
spread of HIV by intravenous drug users themselves. While needle exchange programs were widely
adopted in Europe, the United States’ draconian “War on Drugs” policies have caused ongoing
ambivalence toward public support of these programs. From Alan Greig and Sara Kershnar’s “Harm
reduction in the USA: a movement toward social justice,” in From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest
and Community Building in the Era of Globalization, eds. Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk.
(London: Verso, 2002), 362-3.

9
project’s activist strategy. He recalls growing friction between the politics of ACT UP
and the street-based orientation of CNN’s services. In its fight for fair treatment for
homosexuals in the eyes of the law, ACT UP jettisoned association with socio-
economically categorized groups, including non-whites, the poor, and drug-users, that
could jeopardize the reconfiguration of a mainstream society’s heteronormative
understanding of America’s “general public.” Rhine writes, “For some in ACT
UP, community had become a way of marking exclusions rather than forming bridges and
solidarities. By contrast, CNN saw drug users as a population that AIDS activists needed
to learn from, advocate on behalf of, and serve.”
14
It was through this political milieu
surrounding CNN that Rhine encountered AIDS cultural analysis, which identified
structural inequality as the means by which the virus became an epidemic.
15
This mode
of analysis would continue to inform Rhine in his activist politics, as well as in
developing Ultra-red’s core agenda of deploying aesthetic practices as tools for critical
investigation.
Rhine describes his own electro-acoustic music composition activities during this
time as “me and my roommates in a garage… absolutely marginal.”
16
Then in 1994,
Rhine and Marco Larsen initiated Public Space, a short-lived but important ambient

14
Dont Rhine, “Below the Skin: AIDS Activism and the Art of Clean Needles Now,” X-TRA
Contemporary Art Quarterly, (Spring, 2013), accessed February 28, 2013, http://x-
traonline.org/issues/volume-15/number-3/below-the-skin-aids-activism-and-the-art-of-clean-needles-now/.
15
“Those ideologies were reaffirmed each time the state, bio-medical establishment, religious
institutions, the media, and so forth asked the question, ‘Is the public at risk from AIDS?’ The question
presumes that the term ‘public’ excludes always already those affected by HIV. Thus, the public is defined
in exclusion of queers, people of color, migrants, and the poor – the very people most at risk of HIV
because of the inequities that organize bourgeois society.” Ultra-red, “Organizing the Silence,” in On
Horizons: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, eds. Maria Hlavajova, Simon Sheikh, and Jill Winder
(Utrecht: BAK basis voor actuele kunst, 2011), 207.
16
Dont Rhine, phone interview with the author, January 19, 2013.

10
music club project.
17
Conceived as an afterhours “chill-out club,” a safe place to come
down after a night of hard partying, Public Space would serve as a means for the two
artists to build an L.A.-based community of ambient musicians interested in radical
politics.
Shortly after the launch of Public Space, Rhine became eager to leave Los
Angeles; core leadership at ACT UP was flagging, and Clean Needles Now had been
outcast from the funding infrastructure of ACT UP.
18
Encouraged by Renée Edgington,
he joined the Independent Study program at the Whitney Museum in New York City.
Rhine recalls his time in New York as a period of intensive engagement with ideas of
ambience, particularly those of John Cage and the Situationists. “I was always unhappy
with Brian Eno as the reference for electro-acoustic music,” he recalls, “and I didn’t want
that to be the reference for Ultra-red. That would just be liberalism.”
19
In the liner notes
of Music for Airports, the first ever to call itself “ambient music,” Brian Eno states, “An
ambiance is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint.” Eno goes on to
claim that Music for Airports provide an alternative to the “canned music” designed for
specific spatial environments by Muzak Inc.
20
Revealing why Eno’s alternative to, but
fundamental alignment with, the premise of Muzak Inc.’s canned music would be
problematic for Ultra-red, artist and writer Brandon LaBelle investigates muzak at the
shopping mall in Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. Here, muzak is

17
Rhine and Larsen came together upon the dissolution of an art collective called “bang!manifesto,”
in which they both took part. Ultra-red, “Introduction,” accessed February 28, 2013,
http://www.ultrared.org/lm_intro.html.
18
“As months passed, it also became apparent that needle exchange required an inventory of points
in various sizes to meet the needs of people shooting different kinds of drugs. ACT UP felt the financial
drain almost immediately. Eventually ACT UP and needle exchange decided to go their separate
ways.” Dont Rhine, “Below the Skin,” 3.
19
Dont Rhine, phone interview with the author, January 19, 2012.
20
Brian Eno, “Ambient Music,” in The Book of Music and Nature, eds. David Rothenberg and Marta
Ulvaeus (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 141-2.

11
an ubiquitous, seemingly innocuous part of the aural environment. A critical investigation
of muzak, however, discloses its military origins, designed for implementation in spaces
of manufacturing or consumption in order to induce desired behaviors among its
listeners.
21
In this case, a background aspect of one’s everyday environment is quickly
redefined as a mechanism of social control.
Indeed, Rhine (as Ultra-red) engaged in a prolific writing practice during the mid-
1990s that stridently claims Ultra-red’s distance from electronic music of the
entertainment establishment. Rhine carefully maps an alternate conception of ambient
music in alignment with historical avant-garde and modernist music thinkers and
practitioners such as Erik Satie, Pierre Schaeffer, and John Cage; and radical political
theorists such as Michel de Certeau, Theodor Adorno, Henri Lefebvre, and Guy Debord.
These references orient Ultra-red’s self-theorization toward particular interest in
addressing spatial, social, and political conditions of the everyday. This simultaneous art
historical and political positioning is exemplified in “Postcriptops: Notes on Space
Music,” a 1997 essay. Rhine writes,
[A]mbient music opens a way for us to think the politics of sound. This is, of
course, central to the thesis pursued in our own work. A thesis that, while
accepted by many on a superficial – shall we say, theoretical – level, will
undoubtedly be rejected by most practitioners of audio-art who still cling to a
certain understanding of the avant-garde as detached from the mundane elements
of social space. These artists, working under the burden of their objectifying

21
Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, (New York, London:
Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), 171.

12
distance, make pathetic use of the sounds of everyday life, where those sounds are
reduced to mere sound effect.
22

For Ultra-red, the mundane sounds of everyday life become potent signifiers of politics.
In 1995, Rhine returned to Los Angeles and to Clean Needles Now, and together
with Larsen, resumed electro-acoustic composition. Their collaborative work, now
informed by Rhine’s art historical research in New York, revealed the beginnings of a
theoretical construct that bound their politics with the logic of their aesthetic production.
An early example of such a project emerged out of an incidental matter of practical
necessity, but is retroactively recorded in Ultra-red’s annals as an interdisciplinary
“collaboration” with Clean Needles Now. Edgington was interested in developing a
documentary of CNN’s exchanges with drug users on the streets of Hollywood, but the
organization’s volunteers were apprehensive about carrying conspicuous video
equipment on the job. As an alternative documentary medium, Ultra-red suggested the
kind of audio field recording common to electro-acoustic music production. By sampling
material generated by CNN’s audio-recorded activities on the streets of L.A., Ultra-red
produced a compilation called Soundtrax (1996). The audio samples are primarily
comprised of dialogue between needle exchange volunteers and CNN’s clientele, as well
as encounters with police, with synthesized beats and tones overlaid. In addition to Rhine
and Larsen’s live performance of Soundtrax at Public Space, the raw audio material was
also included as part of an installation by Ultra-red in “Without Alarm I;” the first in a
series of exhibitions about incarceration organized by Arroyo Arts Collective at a former
L.A. City Jail. In a text that accompanied the installation, Ultra-red write that, “These

22
Ultra-red, “Postscriptops: Notes on Space Music” accessed February 28, 2013,
http://www.ultrared.org/lm_postscript.html.

13
compositions provided the blueprint for collaborations between electronic musicians and
direct political action: a strategy of musical practice named, Ultra-red.”
23
This
formulation of Ultra-red as a vector for collaborative action between artists and activists,
would remain essential to the collective membership’s organizational constitution.

1.2 Ultra-red and Union de Vecinos (1997 - 2001)
During the late 90s, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of stories reporting
controversy around the impending HOPE VI demolition and redevelopment of the Aliso
Village housing projects; formerly the largest public housing development west of the
Mississippi River.
24
Many residents were quoted in these stories as glad to see the
projects go, given their reputation as home to drugs, poverty, and rampant gang violence
that plagued residents and surrounding communities of the Boyle Heights
neighborhood.
25
Opposition to the demolition, however, was critical that residents had
not been consulted in planning and decision-making processes around the fate of the
projects, and that as a result, the redevelopment would offer a drastically reduced number
of affordable units.
26
These residents advocated instead for the repair of Aliso Village
buildings, which had incurred damage due to decades of deferred maintenance. At the
heart of this opposition movement were Leonardo Vilchis and Elizabeth Blaney, out of

23
Ultra-red, “sp.o1.a.soundtracks,” accessed February 28, 2013, http://www.ultrared.org/pso1a.html.
24
HOPE VI, also called the “demolition grant,” targets large-scale housing developments such as
Pico Aliso, citing them as infrastructural and social failures. In place of traditional public housing, HOPE
VI supports construction of “mixed income” developments in an effort to reduce concentrations of
impoverished residents in more low-density building styles. While HOPE VI is embraced as a progressive
solution to the modernist model of public housing made notorious by disastrous examples such as the
Pruitt-Igoe projects in St. Louis, critics fear that the policy reduces the total availability of subsidized
housing units, exacerbating an already urgent shortage of affordable housing in urban areas.
25
Angie Chuang, “As Building Falls, So Do Tears: Demolition begins at Pico-Aliso project. Although
residents are looking forward to new units being built, some are sad to see their homes leveled,” Los
Angeles Times, January 17, 1997.
26
George Ramos, “A Work in Progress,” Los Angeles Times, July 17, 1999.

14
whose organizing activities with public housing residents would emerge the housing
advocacy group, Union de Vecinos.
Larsen and Rhine were introduced to Vilches and Blaney in 1997, through
research on a project dealing with gentrification and criminalization of homosexuality in
public space.
27
Rhine describes the encounter with Union de Vecinos as, “the real
beginning of Ultra-red,” in that it signified the expansion of Ultra-red to encompass
multiple methodologies stemming from distinct sites of political struggle under the
umbrella of the sound collective.
28
While Rhine and Larsen pursued political issues
through methodology supplied by AIDS cultural analysis, Vilchis and Blaney utilized a
critical pedagogical methodology indebted to Brazilian literacy educator Paulo Freire.
In “Andante Politics: Popular Education in the Organizing of the Union de
Vecinos,” a 2009 interview between Ultra-red members published in the Journal of
Aesthetics and Protest, Elizabeth Blaney reflects on the origins of Union de Vecinos, and
the formation of their critical pedagogical approach to organizing. At Aliso Village, the
pedagogical project began in the late 1980s with Leonardo Vilchis guiding weekly Bible
study meetings as staff for the Dolores Mission Church.
29
These sessions were distinctive
in their emphasis on applying the Biblical text to the immediate experiences and
problems in the community; at that time, gang violence was the focal issue.
30
Through

27
Ultra-red’s Second Nature was a series of actions, including the creation of an album, which
critiqued the invasion of privacy by policies criminalizing homosexual sex through an interrogation of
cruising in public space, taking Griffith Park in Los Angeles for a case study. For more on Second Nature,
see http://www.ultrared.org/pso2b.html.
28
Dont Rhine, (lecture, Curatorial/Organizational Models, University of Southern California, Los
Angeles, CA, October 26, 2011).
29
Dolores Mission Church is known today for its Homeboy Industries and spin-off programs, a
widely celebrated gang intervention model headed by Father Greg Boyle. Ultra-red, “Andante Politics:
Popular Education in the Organizing of Union de Vecinos,” Grassroots Modernism. Spec. issue of The
Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 8 (Winter 2011/2012): 302.
30
Ultra-red, “Andante Politics,” 302.

15
critical reflection mediated by Bible study, and the support network provided by the study
groups, mothers made successful inroads into curbing youth gang violence without
assistance from the police.
31

When news of the HOPE VI plans for Aliso Village arrived in 1996, the
community perceived the proposed redevelopment of their neighborhood as a threat to
the increasing strength of its self-organized efforts at abating gang violence. While
Dolores Mission supported the redevelopment, Blaney and Vilchis aligned with
residents’ objection to the demolition, a source of friction that led the two to initiate an
independent organizational base. This was the beginning of Union de Vecinos. Blaney
asserts, “We were very clear that we wanted to create a structure for the organization that
was accountable to the community as well as run by the community. As a result, our
Board was made entirely of public housing residents – every single one of them.”
32
This
organizing principle, which placed the impacted community in a leadership position,
required intensive and long-term capacity building. Blaney explains, “Consensus-
building takes a lot of time. It meant a lot of meetings… We did not move forward until
everybody in the group was ready.”
33
According to Blaney, this prioritization of capacity
building meant some lost battles. Ultimately, however, the organizational process in and
of itself was paramount. She states, “for us, organizing is about who leads the process
and whose voices get to be heard.”
34

In critical pedagogy, insistence upon the process of organizing as a measured
cycle of critical reflection, action, and return to critical reflection, as opposed to urgent

31
Blaney’s remarks are corroborated in Celeste Fremon’s article, “Let No Child Be Left Behind,”
Los Angeles Times October 15, 1995.
32
Ultra-red, “Andante Politics,” 305.
33
Ibid., 306.
34
Ibid., 308

16
focus around action and outcome, is what distinguishes organizing from activism. In the
preface to “Andante Politics,” Ultra-red describe this distinction in temporal terms:
“Wearyingly, activism synchronizes itself to capital’s tempo. On the other hand, political
organizing, whose pace distinguishes it from activism, has the potential to organize time
differently. Were it scored for a musical performance, popular education would be
denoted andante; a walking pace sustainable over the long haul.”
35

Through several collaborative projects over the course of Aliso Village’s fight
against demolition, Ultra-red’s artistic practice absorbed lessons from Union de
Vecinos’s critical pedagogy-based organizing strategy. The resulting shifts included:
first, a renegotiation of the role of artist / organizer as a background facilitator of
participant / authors’ work; and second, a regard for process as a focal point. Dr.
Jacqueline Leavitt, an Urban Planner who followed the controversy around the Aliso
Village demolition, chronicles these early collaborations between Ultra-red and Union de
Vecinos in an article published in Progressive Planning Magazine.
36
First among the
projects was an installation called Structural Adjustments (1998), which was featured in
“Without Alarm II;” the second in the three-part series of exhibitions curated by Arroyo
Arts Collective in an L.A. City jail.
37
This installation juxtaposed a visual history of the
demolition of the 10,000-unit Chavez Ravine housing project in 1957 with the imminent
HOPE VI demolition of Aliso Village housing.
38
Leavitt reports that many people under

35
Ibid., 295
36
To my overall argument in regards to activist art and accountability to communities, it is
interesting that these projects are not documented in any arts-based critical or journalistic publications that I
can locate, and were instead of apparent interest to scholars of public housing policy.
37
Ultra-red made an installation around their album, Soundtrax, for the first “Without Alarm.”
38
Leavitt, in “Art and the Politics of Public Housing,” reports that 3,500 units were promised as
replacements to the original 10,000 that comprised the project, but ultimately, the land was overturned for
development of the Dodger Stadium. No replacement units were built. Progressive Planning Magazine,
Fall, 2005, http://www.plannersnetwork.org/publications/2005_Fall/leavitt.htm.

17
threat of displacement in Boyle Heights had been evicted from the Chavez Ravine
development, which lent particular poignancy to the parallel circumstances illustrated in
the installation. Also as a part of this installation, Aliso Village residents read
testimonies in response to the question, “What would you do with the HOPE VI
allocation of $50million?” Solutions were identified and voiced by residents themselves;
enacting Union de Vecinos’s demand for resident control over the fate of the projects.
Leavitt notes, “As people described their living conditions, the soundscape included
dripping water from kitchen faucets.”
39
This element was doubtlessly conceived by Ultra-
red as a complement to many residents’ desires to see HOPE VI funds used to repair and
improve the apartments and grounds they called home.
Leavitt describes Concrete Projections (1999) as an installation comprised of two
video projections drawn from the artists’ and residents’ footage of encounters between
residents and the housing authority.
40
The two videos were projected upon opposite
exterior walls of the Pico Aliso apartments, so as to simulate a dialogue between the two
perspectives. Ultra-red installed a pirate radio station in one apartment, which broadcast
a spoken narrative read from housing authority meeting minutes and a soundscape of
familiar sounds: the nearby church bell’s ringing, and the tinkling of the ice cream truck.
Finally, Leavitt describes Dislocating Housing (2000). This day-long event was
conceived as a “celebration” to bid the Aliso Village housing farewell in the final days of
the impending demolition. Ultra-red recreated the living room interior of an Aliso
Village apartment in the courtyard, complete with a television that played video
documentation of life at Aliso Village. Residents spray-painted messages on exterior

39
Ibid.

18
walls, such as “We like living here,” accompanied by Ultra-red creation of a soundscape
that amplified the sound of spray-paint cans rattling.
41

Curious about the degree to which Union de Vecinos’s prioritization of resident
leadership impacted the composition and implementation of these installations and
actions, I asked Dr. Leavitt if she noticed residents’ participation alongside Ultra-red.
One detail that stood out to her was the fact that the artists provided video cameras, audio
recorders, and still cameras to residents for documenting their experiences with the
eviction and negotiations with the housing authority. In particular, she recalled the
agency residents were able to express by tape-recording their meetings with the housing
authority. Leavitt explained that housing authority representatives were made visibly
anxious by residents so judiciously recording their statements and promises. Further, by
“framing” their experience through the viewfinder of their cameras and pointing their
microphones, Leavitt said she sensed that residents felt more confident and in control of
their demand for a seat at the negotiating table.
42

The audio recordings captured by Ultra-red during this period of collaboration
with Union de Vecinos were compiled onto an album titled Structural Adjustments
(2000), which was released by the electronic music label Mille Plateaux.
43
The album
artwork displays a ghostly architectural rendering of the proposed redevelopment of
Aliso Village, superimposed over a photograph of a bulldozer flattening cleared earth at
the former site of the demolished housing projects; grounding listeners in the span of
events that comprise the album’s subject. Meanwhile, text as part of the album design

41
Ibid.
42
Dr. Jacqueline Leavitt, phone interview with the author, November 12, 2013.
43
The invitation to release an Ultra-red album came from Mille Plateaux as a result of Marco
Larsen’s remix of a track by another artist on the Mille Plateaux label. Dont Rhine, phone interview with
the author, January 19, 2013.

19
reads, “Ultra-red lost sight of the reified object of architecture… bending its ear to the
materiality of social space.”
44
Accordingly, the album’s eleven tracks are comprised of
the sounds from the ambient environment of Aliso Village: construction equipment, birds
chirping, the local ice cream truck, as well as the sounds of Union de Vecino’s
community and organizing activities such as neighbors chanting at a protest, laughing,
and singing “Pidiendo Posada.”
45
Josh Kun, reviewing the album for the Boston Phoenix,
describes Structural Adjustments as “an activist project first, a musical experience
second, with its haunting sonic compositions put into the service of progressive social
critique.”
46
This array of priorities, says Kun, is surprising for Mille Plateaux, “a high-
minded, idea-driven label that has long pushed the theoretical and importance of sound
art without much follow-through on the front of everyday praxis.”
47
Kun’s identification
of Ultra-red as distinct among electro-acoustic recording artist for their overt engagement
in politics through sound aesthetics echoes Rhine’s early situation of the collective in
opposition to a notion of ambiance as decoration (in Eno’s words, “a tint”) and of music
as pure entertainment.
In the summer of 2001, Mille Plateaux offered Ultra-red an opportunity to
perform as part of the label showcase at Sónar; a three-day festival of “advanced music

44
From the album art of Ultra-red’s Structural Adjustments, designed by Terre Thaemlitz.
(Frankfurt: Mille Plateaux, 2000).
45
“Pidiendo Posada” is sung as part of a Mexican Christmas tradition in which neighbors reenact the
story of Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus’s search for shelter by walking from house to house. In a
chilling resonance with the struggle to secure affordable housing, the lyrics read, “In the name of heaven, I
beg you for lodging… Don’t be inhuman; have mercy on us… We are worn out… I am asking you for
lodging…” Translation from http://www.mexconnect.com/articles/1552-mexican-tradition-pidiendo-
posada-the-words-to-the-song
46
Josh Kun, “Uneasy Listening: Structural Adjustments,” The Boston Phoenix, January 31, 2000,
accessed February 28, 2013 at http://www.weeklywire.com/ww/01-31-00/boston_music_2.html.
47
Ibid.

20
and new media art” in Barcelona, Spain, attracting audiences in the tens-of-thousands.
48

The prospect of the Sónar gig prompted Rhine to invite Elizabeth Blaney, Leonardo
Vilchis, and L.A. musician Pablo Garcia to become members of Ultra-red.
49
Together,
the four developed a new performance project, titled Trabajo y Dias (1999 – 2001),
which included recorded samples of music by the L.A.-based band, Los Jorneleros del
Norte. The live performance of Trabajo y Dias featured Vilchis and Blaney reading a
scripted discussion about organizing and immigration, while Garcia electronically
distorted their voices and Rhine played the recorded music samples.
50
The album and
performance dealt with issues of labor and migration, inspired by the fact that only a
fraction of the collaborative that made the album were legally able to travel overseas for
the performances.
51

According to Rhine, because the performance was in Spanish, the Sónar festival
programmers were enthusiastically supportive of Ultra-red, billing them as an act
independent of Mille Plateaux’s showcase. At their first European performance, Ultra-
red had a crowd of over five-hundred, and received much positive press.
52
The success of
Trabajo y Dias at Sónar made Ultra-red attractive to other festival programmers, and as a
result, Ultra-red continued to tour internationally at electronic music festivals throughout
the year. By virtue of this travel, Ultra-red encountered other groups and individuals

48
“What is Sónar?” accessed February 28, 2013, http://www.sonar.es/es/pg/que-es-sonar#.UQWj_-
Oe9EA.
49
Marco Larsen had broken from Ultra-red following the release of Structural Adjustments, leaving
Rhine to tour that album solo. Dont Rhine, phone interview with the author, January 19, 2013.
50
Dont Rhine, phone interview with the author, January 19, 2013.
51
Ibid.
52
Dont Rhine, phone interview with the author, January 19, 2013.

21
working at an intersection of sound and political organizing. In this way, Ultra-red came
to include Manuela Bojadzijev, of Frankfurt-based migration network Kanak Attack.
53

1.3 SILENT|LISTEN: Protocol as Form (2005 – 2009)
Ultra-red’s SILENT|LISTEN series was performed at arts institutions along the
East Coast and in Canada, and characterizes the collective’s returned focus to AIDS in its
work between 2005 and 2009. The SILENT|LISTEN performance varied slightly among
its nine iterations, but four core components comprised each.
54
First, each session opened
with a performance of John Cage’s 4’33”. When the four and one half minutes of silence
ended, the performers called “time” and proceeded to move about the room with a
cordless microphone, asking questions directed at individual audience members. The
questions began with, “What did you hear?” followed by questions about audience
members’ familiarity with the space, about the relationship between the space and AIDS
activism, and about the relationship between the hosting institution and the city beyond.
55

Next, Ultra-red announced the playing of “The Minutes,” which was an accumulation of
recorded statements made by audience members as part of prior performances. Finally,
audience members were invited to add to this body of commentary by entering statements
of their own in “The Record.” These statements were to be played as “The Minutes” in

53
In their manifesto, Kanak Attack describe themselves as “a community of different people from
diverse backgrounds who share a commitment to eradicate racism from German society. Kanak Attak is
not interested in questions about your passport or heritage, in fact it challenges such questions in the first
place. Kanak Attak challenges the conservative and liberal orthodoxy that good ‘race relations’ is simply a
matter of tighter immigration control. Our common position consists of an attack against the ‘Kanakisation’
of specific groups of people through racist ascriptions, which denies people their social, legal and political
rights. Kanak Attak is therefore anti-nationalist, anti-racist and rejects every single form of identity politics,
as supported by ethnic absolutist thinking.” Accessed February 28, 2013 at http://www.kanak-
attak.de/ka/about.html.
54
SILENT|LISTEN (The Record), an exhibition-version of the piece, was installed at the Art Gallery
of Ontario, Toronto (2006), and KwaZulu-Natal Society of Arts, Durban, South Africa (2008).
55
Ultra-red, “Organizing the Silence,” 200-201.

22
the meeting following.
56
The equally considered “set” of the performance was comprised
of stackable chairs, folding tables, and white table clothes ordered from a local
commercial vendor.
57
Ultra-red conceived this décor after the “particular institutional
aesthetic” of symposia held in hotel and university conference rooms, and of convenings
at community based organizations.
58
“However,” Ultra-red state, “estranged from their
conventional settings and repurposed as mise-en-scène for an art event, the tables and
meeting procedures brought to the fore a series of questions seldom asked in these other
settings: Who speaks? Whose voice is amplified? What do we speak of and to whom?
Who listens and to what end do they listen? Who has a place at the table? Who
determines who has a place at the table? An on whose behalf do those seated at the table
speak?”
59

The SILENT|LISTEN series marks several important developments in Ultra-red’s
practice. Firstly, the formulation of the piece resulted in two new members of Ultra-red:
Robert Sember, a New York City-based health policy researcher with a background in
performance studies; and Janna Graham, an artist and Visual Studies student at
Goldsmiths University in London. Secondly, in SILENT|LISTEN, we see the migration
of Union de Vecinos’s critical pedagogical organizing strategy into Ultra-red’s approach
to art-making come to fruition. The performance score, or “protocol” as Ultra-red calls
it, became an aesthetic entity unto itself. As such, Ultra-red’s role as artists shifts from
that of “author” toward that of “facilitator.” Of this shift, Ultra-red often claim that they

56
Initial content for The Record was statements made by representatives of AIDS organizations,
who had been invited by Ultra-red to contribute. Ultra-red, “Organizing the Silence,” 205.
57
The stackable chairs are pointed out in the essay as significantly, “usually reserved for exhibition
openings, educational programs, or workshops,” gesturing toward the museum departmental divide that
segments activities as either “curatorial” or “educational.” Ibid., 204.
58
Ibid.
59
Ibid.

23
became “organizers of silence” or “listening” rather than “organizers of sound.”
60
It is
important to note that as a by-product of this shift, electro-acoustic music is no longer the
primary vehicle of aesthetic and conceptual information it had been in Ultra-red’s prior
career of performing at music festivals. The recording and amplification of sound remain
central, but they become tools at the service of a productive process within the frame of
the unfolding performance, rather than elements of an artistic process happening out of
sight of its audience.
Equally importantly within this shift from “author” to “facilitator” is the
renegotiation of the audience’s role into that of active participants: generators of the
work’s content and analysis. This foregrounding of audience is a classic trope associated
with Cage’s 4’33”, wherein the performer is perceived as having done nothing, while
audiences, through listening, author the musical composition of what is revealed to be a
quite noisy “silence.” Here, however, the performers’ directing microphones to audience
members, amplifying and recording their voices as the primary locus of the work,
emphasizes that renegotiation of authorship. Additionally, Ultra-red’s remixed
performance of 4’33” mediates a shift of critical gaze from issues and concerns around
AIDS activism in the abstract, toward a consideration of AIDS in relation to immediate
social and structural conditions of the space. In this way, SILENT|LISTEN achieves a
simultaneity between “real” action and critical distance accomplished through “art.”
Along the lines of this simultaneity, Ultra-red state, “The intersection between aesthetics
and efficiency was also a consideration in the carefully composed protocols used to
facilitate the event. The precisely scripted instructions to participants used repetition to

60
Dont Rhine, “Ultra-Red 2010 Annual Report,”, 2.

24
produce what seemed to be a well-rehearsed performance as well as an efficiently run
meeting.”
61

Retrospectively, one final observation can be made about SILENT|LISTEN in
terms of Ultra-red’s evolving practice. Employing Cage’s historic 4’33” at the service of
this politically-charged project, Ultra-red insinuate their own ongoing critical
interrogation of the relationship between sound, aesthetics, and politics as a central focus
of the re-conceived performance. This interrogation of the conceptual basis for Ultra-
red’s use of sound, and their place within discourses around sound art, has accompanied
the collective into its present-day practice.

1.4 The School of Echoes (2009 – the present)
The School of Echoes is an ongoing initiative wherein Ultra-red members are
experimenting with aesthetic, organizing, and pedagogical techniques in the contexts of
social organizing struggles with which they are respectively affiliated. The project
emerged from a residency at Raven Row Gallery in London in 2009. Ultra-red members
organized a series of five listening exercises: Silence, Thematic Investigation, Sound
Object, Sound Walk, and Organized Listening, for assembling and reflecting upon the
collective’s pool of sound-based techniques for fusing artistic practice with organizing.
62

Activists from local organizing efforts were identified and invited to participate with
Ultra-red in these exercises, and together they interrogated the efficacy of each model
relative to their own respective organizing contexts.

61
Ultra-red, “Organizing the Silence,” 203.
62
Raven Row, “Ultra-red. School of Echoes,” accessed February 28, 2013 at
http://www.ravenrow.org/residencies/ultrared/

25
As the residency came to a close, Ultra-red elected to continue the School of
Echoes as a long-term inquiry, linking its members’ disparate practices under one
collective-wide research project of the same name. Therefore, each School of Echoes has
its own distinct curriculum, methodology, line of inquiry, and set of institutional
affiliations according to the organizing contexts in which they are situated. For instance,
in New York, the School of Echoes under Ultra-red member Robert Sember is an archive
project of the House Ballroom scene.
63
Meanwhile the Schools of Echoes in London,
under members Janna Graham, Chris Jones, and Elliot Perkins, and in Berlin, under
members Manuela Bojadžijev and Ceren Türkmen, are offered as ethnography courses
focusing on migration and local effects of the financial crisis through formal university
institutions.
Importantly, the continuation of the School of Echoes enables Ultra-red members
to substantiate an intentional reinvestment in the founding inquiries laid out in the
collective’s mission: to explore the useful relationship between aesthetics and political
organizing within the local communities to which each member is accountable. This
final aspect of the School of Echoes, the prioritization of the receptive frame of the local
context, can be understood as a reaction against art world pressures that consecrate

63
House Ball culture, which provides a social space for homosexual men through a complex
network of club-like “house” affiliations, has been active in New York City since the 1930s. Today, the
House Ball scene is known particularly for its exuberant dance forms, such as “vogueing,” as made popular
first by Jenny Livingston’s 1997 documentary film, Paris is Burning, and soon after in the music video for
Madonna’s hit song, “Vogue.” Sember’s involvement with the contemporary House Ball community
began through his work as an instructor in a CDC-funded HIV/AIDS prevention training program. Finding
the traditional, often-paternalistic approach to public health education ineffectual, Sember re-negotiated his
position from that of “educator” to that of “learner,” deferring to House Ball community leadership on
developing culturally-specific modes for reaching the community. For more on Sember’s House Ball
community archive project, Vogue’ology, see Jacob Gaboury’s “Elements of Vogue: A Conversation with
Ultra-red,” Rhizome on December 15, 2010. Accessed online on February 28, 2013 at
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2010/dec/15/elements-of-vogue-a-conversation-with-ultra-red/.

26
aesthetic outcomes of activist practices as art only upon the dislocation of those objects
from the contexts of their production or application.
64

The School of Echoes, Los Angeles (2011 – present) is only recently formed. The
project is being developed collaboratively by L.A.-based Ultra-red members as an effort
to bring together a network of fields of organizing through a shared engagement in
critical pedagogical research. These disparate fields are represented by L.A.-based
members’ organizing work: public health, gentrification, public education, and AIDS
activism.
65
Participants are invited to join in a critical investigation of these organizing
fields alongside Ultra-red members, or to embark on an investigation within their own
organizing project. One intent of the research and analysis to be undertaken under the
School of Echoes, Los Angeles (SOELA) is as a “step-back” from the often harried hand-
to-mouth cycle of community organizing. SOELA provides a venue for critical reflection
upon one’s relationship with the work, and for exploring the shared goals and challenges
that exist between otherwise largely disconnected sites of struggle for social justice
organizing in Los Angeles.
66
As a means of facilitating this connection, Ultra-red has
been convening regular meetings of the SOELA cohort. Through these meetings, the
critical pedagogical process will be continually collectively analyzed through protocols
co-designed by Ultra-red members and participants in SOELA. The critical pedagogical

64
Dont Rhine speaking in response to a question about the distinction between Ultra-red and the
School of Echoes (School of Echoes meeting, Union de Vecinos Maywood Office, Maywood, CA,
December 7,
,
2012).
65
Walt Senterfit is an ethics supervisor that the L.A. County Department of Public Health; Pablo
Garcia and Leon Mostovoy hold leadership positions with Woodcraft Rangers, an after-school provider of
arts and athletics programming; Elizabeth Blaney is Director of Union de Vecinos in Boyle Heights;
Leonardo Vilchis is Director of Union de Vecinos in Maywood, and Dont Rhine is an AIDS activist and
volunteer with Clean Needles Now.
66
At a SOELA planning meeting on December 7, 2012 at Union de Vecinos’s Maywood Office,
Leonardo Vilches voiced his feeling that strategies for making change, which had been successful in the
past, are no longer effective. Persistent isolation between organizing groups precludes effective reworking
of strategies.

27
model proposed in SOELA, a collaboration between “teacher” and “student” in an
ongoing research-based investigation and critical analysis of structural conditions, is
prevalently informed by the Freirian critical pedagogical philosophy and methodology
that has influenced Ultra-red’s work since the mid-90s.
Fundamental to this research and analysis is a process of cultivating critical
awareness by developing aesthetic mediations, or what Paulo Freire calls “codifications,”
through which one can reacquaint oneself with the structural conditions of one’s
surroundings. As intimated by their mission and reaffirmed in the shared School of
Echoes project, the precise function of these codifications is, for Ultra-red, an
investigative project unto itself. In the next chapter, I will outline Freire’s critical
pedagogy, with particular focus on the role of codifications in his “problem-posting”
methodology of community organizing through emancipatory education.

28
Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy
CHAPTER 2

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)
67
is among the classic texts in
the field of critical pedagogy. The book describes a philosophy and methodology for an
emancipatory kind of educational process. As an alternative to the widespread
pedagogical framework informed by the “false charity” of a privileged class, Freire’s
“problem-posing” approach is a radically dialectical model, intending nothing less than to
dissolve oppressor – oppressed power-relations through literacy education that cultivates
critical thinking and community building.
68

Freire’s brand of critical pedagogy is founded in a philosophy of humankind’s
universal right to speech.
69
For Freire, speech is the practical apparatus of self-hood and
creative interaction with the world. As he puts it, “to speak a true word is to transform
the world.”
70
Further, true speech cannot emerge in isolation, within an exclusive
context, nor through speaking on behalf of others. Rather, true speech is mutually
reinforced between subjects through genuine dialogue, or, “the encounter between men,
mediated by the world, in order to name the world.”
71
Given the power ascribed to

67
Paulo Freire was born in Recife, Brazil, in 1921. His successful experimentations in adult literacy
education through critical pedagogy secured him an invitation from President Joao Belchior Goulart to
develop a national literacy campaign. In its first year, the project aimed to educate five million Brazilians.
The campaign was cancelled when Goulart was deposed by the 1964 military coup, and Freire was exiled
for sixteen years. He continued to write and develop his internationally impactful theory of critical
pedagogy until his death in 1997. For more on Paulo Freire’s life and work, see
http://www.paulofreireinstitute.org/.
68
“In order to have the continued opportunity to express their ‘generosity,’ the oppressors must
perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this ‘generosity,’ which is
nourished by death, despair, and poverty. … True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the
causes which nourish false charity.” Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman
Ramos, (New York, London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011) 44-5.
69
“To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. … saying that word is not the privilege of
some few persons, but the right of everyone.” Ibid., 88.
70
Ibid., 87.
71
Ibid., 88.

29
speech, oppression occurs when one person denies another his or her ability to practice
the human right of speech. Thus, recuperation of one’s right and capacity to participate
in politics and culture through speech is the means by which silenced people overcome
oppression.
72
The site of education, then, of learning to speak and be literate, is the site of
emancipation.
However, according to Freire, the typical teacher-student dynamic found in
traditional classroom settings, where teachers are active, speaking subjects while students
are inert, listening objects, inherently preempts a process of emancipatory learning.
Freire critiques this relation in a conception of traditional education that he calls “the
banking method.” According to Freire’s banking method construct, “knowledge is a gift
bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they
consider to know nothing.”
73
This gift economy is reflected more generally in society
between classes, wherein a privileged class maintains its position by parceling “gifts” of
welfare upon a perpetually needy and indebted poor.
74
Thus, Freire theorizes, “Education
as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological
intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of
oppression.”
75

Freire’s “problem-posing” method advocates a model in radical opposition to the
traditional construct of education. Problem-posing education is grounded in an exchange
of knowledge and experience between teacher and student in an iterative dialogic process

72
“If it is in speaking their word that people, by naming the world, transform it, dialogue imposes
itself as the way by which they achieve significance as human beings.” Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
88.
73
Ibid., 72.
74
Ibid., 44.
75
Ibid., 78.

30
through which all participants mutually assume the statuses of both “teacher” and
“student.”
76
Specifically, this dialogic process entails the collaborative investigation and
analysis of oppressive conditions surrounding the community of participants; what Freire
calls, the “limiting situation.” He states, “In order for the oppressed to be able to wage
the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a
closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation, which they can
transform.”
77
A community’s limiting situation, once identified, is broken down into
areas of research, called “generative themes,” the composite of which comprise the
“thematic universe” of a critical pedagogical project.
78
This process of redefining reality
into a curriculum for study, a thematic universe, is not a preparatory activity carried out
by teachers in advance. Rather, for Freire, teachers and students working collaboratively
to identify and articulate situations and experiences for collective analysis is the core
activity of/in critical pedagogy. Of the task of defining a thematic universe, Freire states,
“It is to the reality which mediates men, and to the perception of that reality held by
educators and people, that we must go to find the program content of education.”
79

To practically initiate a critical pedagogical project, primary investigators-cum-
organizers develop a second-hand familiarity with a research context, and recruit willing
community members to a meeting wherein investigators’ presence and objectives are
discussed, and members are invited to join the project as “co-investigators.” Next,
primary investigators engage in an intense phase of research and documentation,

76
“Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a
new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-
teacher, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also
teach.” Ibid., 80.
77
Ibid., 49.
78
Ibid., 96.
79
Ibid.

31
observing the social, labor, and domestic experiences in community members’ lives.
80

The results of these documentations form a series of preliminary reports and presented to
the team of co-investigators, who respond by identifying contradictions and
inconsistencies in experience and knowledge among the group.
81

These areas of contention provide content for the second stage of research, which
is to develop “codifications.” Codifications are objects that serve as mediations,
collective reflection upon which gives rise to a critical analysis of the real-life condition it
represents. From this new understanding of concrete conditions, a new problem is
identified by the team, which re-initiates the process of collective investigation. As the
process continues, a community of investigators is hoped to become agents and
organizers of their own struggle against the structural causes of oppression specific to
their experience.
82
The process of reflection upon, analysis of, and active response to
oppressive conditions is, for Freire’s critical pedagogy, a necessarily cyclical process,
“This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed,
and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their
liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade.”
83

80
Ibid., 111-2.
81
Ibid., 112.
82
Ibid., 109.
83
Ibid., 48.

32
2.1 Freire’s Codifications: aesthetic objects for critical reflection
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire offers specifications for preparation and
utilization of aesthetic “codifications,” which he regards as distinct from the development
of “visual aids” typically used in education contexts.
84
First, codifications must be easily
identifiable by co-investigators as representative of a familiar aspect of their specific
experience; a codification representing conditions from outside the investigative context
is “inadmissible.”
85
Additionally, the codification should be neither too obvious, nor too
obscure. Instead, codifications should be “simple in their complexity and offer various
decoding possibilities in order to avoid the brainwashing tendencies of propaganda.”
86

Apart from these qualifications, the codification can be rendered in a range of media, and
presented according to strategies best suited to the specific context of the investigative
inquiry.
87

Freire’s codifications were simply rendered, line-drawn illustrations, projected
upon a wall for group analysis. Examples are provided in his Education for Critical
Consciousness. The first codification pictured is a drawing of a scene familiar to Freire’s
peasant literacy students: a man on a farm, holding a book in one hand and a trowel in the
other. Students discuss which elements of the image represent culture, how and why
these tools and products exist, and for what ends.
88
In the “decoding” of a codification,
Freire contends that students can access critical awareness to a previously pervasive and

84
Ibid., 114.
85
Ibid.
86
Ibid., 115.
87
Ibid., 117, 121.
88
Freire records discussion among his students about this codified “situation”: “Through the
discussion of this situation – man as a being of relationships – the participants arrive at the distinction
between two worlds: that of nature and that of culture. They receive the normal situation of man as a being
in the world and with the world, as a creative and re-creative being who, through work, constantly alters
reality.” Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (New York, London: Continuum International
Publishing Group, 2005 edition), 57.

33
illegible situation. As Freire puts it, “If the decoding is well done, this movement of flux
and reflux from the abstract to the concrete which occurs in the analysis of a coded
situation leads to the supersedence of the abstraction by the critical perception of the
concrete, which has already ceased to be a dense, impenetrable reality.”
89
The aesthetic
mediation, or “codification,” becomes a “figure,” which can be understood as separate
from and in relation to its “ground,” the network of social structures and institutions that
comprise the community, society, and culture within which a student’s life is situated.
While at no point does Freire describe the codifications as artworks, the logic of
these objects might be understood to share a certain kinship with conceptual art of Latin
America, specifically Brazil, in the 1960s. In artists’ public space interventions
protesting violent authoritarian rule following the 1964 military coup, as well as in the
popular music of the oppositional Tropicália movement, the aesthetic experience is
rooted in a strategy of provoking critical awareness among the general public. Indeed, in
Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation, a history detailing the
simultaneous emergence of critical pedagogy and conceptual art in Latin America, Luis
Camnitzer traces the parallel thinking between that of conceptual art practices and Freire:
“Freire’s belief that ‘the reading of the world precedes the reading of the word’ could be
taken as a paradigm for both conceptualist art and the new progressive teaching.”
90
Here,
everyday conditions are understood as loaded with potential for critical analysis not
requiring a specialized education, or even, in Freire’s case, basic literacy.
In the decades since, Freire’s model for critical pedagogy, particularly his
thinking on the politics of participation and problematization of the traditional teacher-

89
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 105.
90
Louis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation, (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2007), 112.

34
student dynamic, has been widely assimilated within contemporary pedagogical art.
While his name and ideas are often referenced in contemporary art discursive contexts, it
strikes me as odd that little mention is made of the role aesthetics play in his
methodology. In the next chapter, I will explore the specific import of sound in Ultra-
red’s Freire-inspired practice by reading the critical pedagogical process within and
through aesthetics and concepts native to sound art history and theory.

35
Specifically Sound
CHAPTER 3

An historical genealogy of any contemporary sound art practice almost invariably
begins with two seminal innovations in conceptual understandings of sound and
musicality: Pierre Schaeffer’s development of musique concrète, or concrete music, and
John Cage’s reconceptualization of silence and sound as socially constructed, aesthetic
phenomena. The influences of both are evident in Ultra-red’s oeuvre, as they variously
propose platforms for representing sounds and circumstances of listening as objective
abstractions for reflexive critical thought. The work of contemporary thinkers and
practitioners, R. Murray Schafer’s acoustic ecology, Brandon Labelle’s sound-based
sociological research, and Pauline Oliveros’s deep listening, ground this reflexive regard
for sound and listening in intentionally social and political contexts.
First performed in 1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall outside of Woodstock, New
York, the performance score 4’33” called for its performer to indicate the beginnings and
ends of the composition’s sections by closing and opening the keyboard lid of an
otherwise untouched piano.
91
The famous result was that sounds (the turning pages of the
music, the weather outside, the movements of the audience) filled the room.
92
Among the
work’s profound implications are: first, a reveal of the theoretical construct of “music” as
significant sounds happening within the frame of a “composition” or “performance;”

91
As Kyle Gann explains, the piece evolved with Cage’s thinking on “silence,” ultimately requiring
no specific length of time, nor even a performer. Of this explosion of the composition’s limits, Gann states,
“Ultimately, we are left with the conundrum that 4’33” has expanded into an infinite river of a piece into
which any of us can dip at any time we please.” From Kyle Gann’s No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage’s
4’33”(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 187.
92
Cage recalls the sounds of that first performance, “What they thought was silence, because they
didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during
the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering on the roof, and during the third the
people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.” Ibid., 4.

36
second, an inversion of the ideal concept of “silence,” which in turn gives rise to the
aesthetic and material significance of all sounds; and third, an emphasis upon the process
of attention by which these sounds are apprehended, namely, listening.
Pierre Schaeffer’s concrete music offers propositions around sound, listening, and
musical significance distinct from, but compatible with those of 4’33”. In a collection of
writings called In Search of a Concrete Music, Schaeffer recounts an experimental
endeavor to develop sounds unencumbered by the signification of their source. In 1949
Schaeffer first discovered such a sound, which he termed l’ objet sonore, or sound object,
in the act of manipulating recordings of sounds form conventional instruments. For
example, he states that playing a recorded sound backward “doubles, at least a priori, the
number of known instruments.”
93
Like Cage’s 4’33”, Schaeffer’s sound objects tested
the conceptual limits of music and composition.
94
Analogizing sound objects to music as
words to prose, he writes:
Another peculiarity of these little sound creatures was that in some way they
eluded the language of music. Initially assembled to make phrases, they had
escaped like the words from a dictionary and were going tirelessly round and
round on the turntables all by themselves. This phenomenon could well appear
unimportant to the inattentive ears of so many professional musicians… Poets,

93
Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of Concrete Music, trans. John Dack and Christine North, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012), 9.
94
Schaeffer toyed with whether concrete music should exist within the theoretical discursive realm
of music, or on its own, “[I]s there a case for seeking out a new sound domain on the borders of music, or,
on the contrary, should these new concrete music materials… be incorporated into a musical form?” Ibid.,
23.

37
much more aware, opened their ears up. …. [the sound objects] came hot off the
press, landing on the ear with no conceptual baggage.
95

Here, as in 4’33”, all sounds gain a potentially musical significance based on a shift in
the listener’s attention toward a non-judgmental appreciation of their aesthetic qualities.
Distinctly, however, sound objects are constituted as aural phenomena stripped of their
contexts of origin through a material process of abstraction.
Since the 1980s emergence of the term, “sound art,” critical histories of sound
have increasingly aimed to reconcile the legacy of Cage and Schaeffer with contemporary
sound-based practices interested in questions of context, politics, and sociality.
96
This is
the project of Seth Kim-Cohen’s In The Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic
Art, which characterizes the theoretical discourse around sound history as having “missed
the conceptual turn,” in comparison to the visual arts. In his introduction, Kim-Cohen
suggests a parallel between the Schaefferian regard for sound as pure aesthetic event with
modernist critic Clement Greenberg’s critical theory advancing purity of medium.
97
His
text endeavors to outline a history of conceptual sound art, wherein “the conceptual” is
understood as a mode of questioning the fundamental “ergon” of an aesthetic practice
concerning issues of context beyond the limits of materiality.
98
Douglas Kahn, in Noise
Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, provides a similarly critical read of sound art

95
Ibid., 33.
96
Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
2001), 18.
97
Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, (New York, London:
Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009), xix.
98
“Especially if we allow ourselves to think conceptually not just about the visual and plastic arts,
but also about the immaterial practices of the sonic arts—as well as dance, literature, even criticism and
philosophy— then the crucial movement cannot simply be a move away from material. It is more
specifically, and more incisively, a move away from the elements that conventionally establish the ergon of
the work—the issues, questions, and considerations that had historically been taken for granted as the heart
of the artistic matter.” Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, 245.

38
history, aiming to affirm “the political, poetical, and ecological” aspects of sound in the
arts.
99
According to Kahn, mainstream discourse on the phenomenology of sound has
been restricted to Pierre Schaeffer’s terms, sound as heard in-and-of-itself, and upheld by
John Cage’s call to “let sounds be themselves.”
100
These emphases upon materiality,
Kahn claims, preempt a reflection upon sound as a phenomenon of social and political
origins and import.
With Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, artist and writer Brandon
LaBelle rejects Kahn’s critique, and offers a reading of both Cage’s 4’33” and
Schaeffer’s concrete music as grounded in a conceptual regard for social conditions of
sound. While allowing for their emphases upon the materiality of sound, LaBelle
proposes that both implicate listeners in a heightened awareness of the sociality of
reception. The kind of listening Cage proposes through 4’33” is “wed to a conceptual,
critical practice based on self-reflection, contextual awareness, the appropriation of found
materials, and an overarching interest in social reality,” while in Schaeffer’s music
concrète, “The theatrics of sonic diffusion creates its own unique presence, turning a
given time and place into an active musical experience.”
101

A critical precedent to these contemporary efforts of conceiving sound art in
terms of context and its attendant social and political impacts is the theorization of
“acoustic ecology” by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, in the mid-1970s. In The
Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, Schafer lays out

99
Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 4.
100
Ibid., 163.
101
Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, (New York, London:
Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 5.

39
acoustic ecology as “the study of sounds in relationship to life and society.”
102
Toward
establishing this field of study, he delineates a methodology for historical, environmental,
and political analysis of communities through empirical investigation of their
“soundscapes.”
103
Schafer’s conception of acoustic ecology was initially intended as a
foundation for his campaign against noise pollution, but practitioners and scholars of
composition and environmental sound art have widely adopted his methodological
approach to analyzing society through sound toward other exploratory applications. A
contemporary example of such an adaptation of Schafer’s acoustic research is found in
Brandon LaBelle’s Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, which stages
a sound-based sociological investigation of contemporary urban institutions and
behaviors through their sonic expressions. LaBelle describes the project in terms that
ring with Schafer’s acoustic ecology; “…I’ve been more interested to push the question
of noise away from an analysis of sound pressure levels and toward a general inquiry into
the meanings noise may have within specific contexts, for particular communities.”
104
This shift toward the social and contextual situatedness of sound is likewise seen
in the listening practices developed by influential contemporary composer, performer,
and educator Pauline Oliveros. A disciple of Cage, Oliveros’s practice was grounded in
the kind of “inclusive” listening practice enacted in 4’33”.
105
Oliveros’s elaboration of
listening, however, inflects the practice toward political ends. In “My ‘American’ Music:
Soundscape, Politics, Technology, Community,” Oliveros recalls how this approach

102
R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World,
(Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1993), 205.
103
Ultra-red frequently uses Schafer’s term, which he defines as “any acoustic field of study.”
Schafer, The Soundscape, 7.
104
Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories, xiv.
105
Martha Mockus, Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality (New York: Routledge,
2008), 3.

40
distinguished her work from the prevailing conception of experimental music
composition in the 1960s. Her colleagues, she explains, were pursuing “an extreme
intellectual approach,” composing in a way that would “align themselves with the
scientific method.”
106
The result was a “disembodied music” that “required exclusive
focus to understand.”
107
Oliveros, meanwhile, “went the opposite direction.”
108
She was
profoundly impacted by political unrest of the time: the protest movement against the
Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassination and the My Lai Massacre. She cites these
events as catalytic in her commitment to facilitating social “connectedness” and
“togetherness” through her work.
109
From this commitment to orient music and listening
toward the implicit politics of sounds emerged Oliveros’s deep listening, defined as “a
practice that is intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many
dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible.”
110
In Deep
Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, Oliveros intimates the social and political
significance of everyday sounds. “Why should we be interested in the sound of traffic, or
cafeteria noises, or the din of multitudinous conversations, or garbage cans crashing in
the street at 2am, or a pin dropping in a quiet place? … Extending our awareness as far
as possible to include any and all sounds places one in the center of the environment,
with presence and relationship to all that is going on.”
111
Here, connection between
hearing sound and knowing what is “going on,” in accordance with Oliveros’s deep

106
Pauline Oliveros, “My ‘American’ Music: Soundscape, Politics, Technology, Community,”
American Music, vol. 25 no. 4 (Winter, 2007): 392, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40071676.
107
Ibid.
108
Ibid.
109
Ibid.
110
Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, Inc.,
2005), xxiii.
111
Ibid., 18.

41
listening as cultivation of as many dimensions of awareness as possible, implicates
sounds as empirical manifestations of social and political dynamics around us.
3.1 Ambiance as Thematic Universe
John Cage, Paulo Freire, and R. Murray Schafer share a conception of the world
as composition. In 1952, Cage’s 4’33” invited sounds of the world into his composition,
shifting the emphases of attention away from the self-consciously produced musical
sound, toward a capacity for hearing the musicality of all sounds. Schafer takes up
Cage’s proposition of the world as “macrocosmic musical composition,” one that can be
“tuned” through an acoustics-based reengineering of society.
112
Somewhat similarly,
reaching an understanding of the world as a composition, a man-made cultural creation
transformed by literate people, is the fundamental lesson of Freire’s critical pedagogy.
This common recognition of the world as composition, musical or not, shares an
affinity with the trope of “ambience” in electro-acoustic music and sound art. Here,
“ambience” is understood in contrast to “noise,” as in “background noise.” Key to this
construction of ambience is the notion that background noise emerges as “ambience”
only through a process of mediation; a process by which the world around us is re-
presented, and thereby recognized as such.
113
Kahn calls this condition of ambience
significant noise, which he characterizes as, “a legibility of an apparent illegibility.”
114
In
the context of Freire’s critical pedagogy, this notion of ambience as “legible illegibility,”
or “known unknown,” is the operative concept in his term, “thematic universe.” In
identifying a thematic universe, participants of a critical pedagogical project trace an

112
Schafer, The Soundscape, 5.
113
In “Deadrooms,” Ultra-red state, “ambient music realizes the postmodern conceit that the real is
only accessible through its mediation.” Accessed February 28, 2013 at
http://www.ultrared.org/lm_dead.html.
114
Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 26

42
outline of their circumstances by drawing on everyday experiences, without yet fully
understanding the historical trajectory and socio-political mechanisms by which these
circumstances come to be. By framing and naming their circumstances, however, a once
opaque reality becomes a field of study ripe for demystification through empirical
analysis. With a thematic universe established, the participants turn to an empirical
analysis of generative themes abstractly re-presented as codifications.

3.2 Coding and Decoding Sounds as Objects
Pierre Schaeffer’s sound objects, stripped as they are of the real-world condition
they signify, would seem an unlikely tool for a pedagogical project that seeks heightened
critical awareness of material circumstances and causes of oppression in the world. For
Schaeffer, sound objects demand a “reduced listening;” listening for the purpose of
focusing on the qualities of the sound itself (e.g. pitch, timbre) independent of its source
or meaning.
115
However, the theoretical construct of the sound object offers a practical
platform toward developing codifications for the kind of sound-based critical pedagogy
practiced by Ultra-red. Firstly, the sound object extracts a sound from its everyday
environment, transforming it into an object for objective analysis. This subtle but
important attribute is in accordance with Freire’s stipulation that objects of pedagogical
investigation remain objective, so as to prevent participants themselves from becoming
objects of research.
116
Secondly, through this process of extraction, the familiar referent
of a sound objects becomes abstracted, making it foreign to its observers. LaBelle
describes the concrete music sound object as an abstraction: “concrete music locates

115
Brandon LaBelle quoting Michel Chion in Background Noise (27).
116
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 107.

43
sound’s liberation through ideal configurations, harnessing sound’s intrinsic ambiguity or
malleability so as to create distinct auditory experiences abstracted from an original
source, beyond or in spite of material reference.”
117
Decoding sound objects leads to
rediscovery and redefinition of their referents, the collection of which can be critically
analyzed as independent and in interaction with each other, giving rise to a new
understanding of the environmental situation from which they were drawn.
The exercise of decoding aesthetic abstractions constructed specifically for the
pedagogic process can be applied to un-abstracted objects of the everyday. Freire
suggests, for instance, the local newspaper.
118
“This practice,” Freire states, “helps
develop a sense of criticism, so that people will react to newspapers or news broadcasts
not as passive objects… but rather as consciousness’s seeking to be free.”
119
As a
pedagogical aspect of his acoustic ecology, Schafer recommends sound walks as a mode
of studying a given environment while training the critical attention of one’s ear.
Interestingly, in concert with Freire’s goal that participants become aware of their agency
as authors of the world’s culture, Shafer implicates the soundwalker as composer.
“When the soundwalker is instructed to listen to the soundscape, he is audience; when he
is asked to participate with it, he becomes composer-performer.”
120
Schafer’s conception
of an empirical methodology for isolating and investigating the origins and implications
of sounds in our own environments, toward activist ends, provides Ultra-red with the
critical link for leveraging theoretical constructs of ambience within an application of

117
LaBelle, Acoustic Territories, 25.
118
Toward a newspaper as object of reflection, the co-investigators’ line of questioning would be,
“Why do different newspapers have such different interpretations of the same fact?” Freire, Pedagogy of
the Oppressed, 122.
119
Ibid., 123.
120
Schafer, The Soundscape, 213.

44
Freire’s pedagogy. Ultra-red utilizes the sound walk as a tool for collective critical
investigation of a community’s environment.

3.3 Panaurality within the Critical Pedagogical Frame
The panaurality (hearing of all sounds) proposed in Cage’s 4’33” came to include
even inaudible sounds, such as those of his circulatory and nervous systems he
encountered during his famous visit to Harvard University’s anechoic chamber.
121

Douglas Kahn points out yet a third sound Cage must have heard during that visit: “the
one saying, ‘Hmmmm, wonder what the low-pitched sound is? What’s that high-pitched
sound?’”
122
While Cage may not have heard this voice as a sound-in-itself on the level of
the pulsing and humming of his own body, it was doubtlessly present. Without it, Cage
could not have narrativized the experience for others, as he reportedly did with legendary
frequency.
This inner voice, I posit, is the sound of reflexive criticality. As the anechoic
chamber established a special space of reception, through which Cage was able to hear
himself, the space of reception established by the critical pedagogical process, through
analysis of aesthetic objects, sets the sound of the critical voice on the proverbial
pedestal. Alongside the de-codification of the world through aesthetic mediation is the
foregrounding of the reflexive voice that asks, “How is this reflected in my experience?
What does this mean for me? What does this mean for my community?” While the space
of reception manifest in critical pedagogical process establishes an intentional space of

121
Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 190.
122
Kim-Cohen leverages Kahn’s analysis toward his discussion of the fundamentally conceptual
nature of this moment, which Cage would deny in order to advance his notion of “sound-in-itself.” Kim-
Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, 222.

45
careful looking at and listening to objects, similar to that of a museum gallery or concert
hall, the function of that object here is to amplify the inner critical voice. In this way,
attention shifts from the aesthetic object toward the process of attention itself.
LaBelle argues that Cage’s 4’33” functions “as both the work and self-
referentiality onto the work, so as to lead a listener toward a self-reflexive awareness
about the procedures in operation.”
123
In the same vein, Paulo Freire understands the
apprehension of situationality as a precondition to critical thinking, “Reflection upon
situationality is reflection about the very condition of existence: critical thinking by
means of which people discover each other to be ‘in a situation’.”
124
Just as 4’33”
constructs a frame for analyzing not only the aesthetic materiality of sound, but also the
social and subjective conditions of listening, critical pedagogy provides a frame for
recognizing and analyzing the process of cultivating critical awareness. Of this reflexive
observation, Freire states that students, “begin to see how they themselves acted while
actually experiencing the situation they are now analyzing, and thus reach a perception of
their own previous perception.”
125

When the reflexive critical voice is enunciated within the critical pedagogical
envelope, this “watching oneself watching,” or in this case, “listening to oneself
listening,” is transposed into a collective self-reflexivity. Through dialogue, individual
responses to the collectively witnessed sound object reveal the diversity of listening
experience relative to each. Thus, within the critical pedagogical frame, analytical
engagement is displaced from “what we hear” to “how we hear. This was the “listening
to my own listening” I experienced at the Self Help Graphics meeting on that drizzly

123
LaBelle, Background Noise, 10.
124
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 109.
125
Ibid., 115.

46
night in November. Ultra-red’s refrain of “What did you hear?” profoundly impacted
the inflection of the meeting; what would have otherwise been a typical deadlock of
competing needs and opinions between community stakeholders was instead an
investigation into the diversity in participants’ understanding of key words and ideas,
such as “the poor,” “the artists,” and “the developers.” In initiating the meeting by first
imploring us to “listen to the space and its history,” participants got to practice a context-
specific “deep listen” to environmental sounds. Once established, this deep listening
became the condition of hearing each other; our specific dialogic process became the
sonic object for critical analysis.

3.4 Silence
The classic lesson in Cage’s “silence” is that there exists no such thing as absolute
silence. Oliveros’s deep listening, like Cage’s panaurality, implies a listening for
unheard sounds. However, the “expansion” of awareness and attention cultivated in deep
listening is ultimately, for Oliveros, about the politics of representation. She states,
I began to understand that many people felt that they were not being heard
(something especially true today, both locally and globally). I recognized that
being heard is a step toward being understood. Being understood is a step toward
being healed. Understanding is a step toward building community.
126

Taking a similarly skeptical stance toward an absence of sound in initiating the critical
pedagogical process, Freire says an impression of silence should not be assumed to
indicate a circumstance of political tranquility. He states, “A group [of students] which

126
Oliveros, “My ‘American’ Music,” 393.

47
does not concretely express a generative thematics – a fact which might appear to imply
the nonexistence of themes – is, on the contrary, suggesting a very dramatic theme: the
theme of silence. The theme of silence suggests a structure of mutism in the face of the
overwhelming force of limit-situations.”
127
Here, the very character of a community’s
capacity for participation in a democratic system that presupposes equal access to public
representation vis-à-vis speech becomes the basis of a critical pedagogical curriculum.
128

Freire’s philosophy of organizing, however, is not one that necessarily
emphasizes visibility. Rather, for Freire, a prioritization of reflection constitutes critical
pedagogy as an emancipatory organizing strategy. He states, “The insistence that the
oppressed engage in reflection on their concrete situation is not a call to armchair
revolution. On the contrary, reflection – true reflection – leads to action. On the other
hand, when the situation calls for action, that action will constitute an authentic praxis
only if its consequences become the object of critical reflection.
129
This distinction
between organizing and activism is reflected in the logic of Ultra-red’s productive
strategy. Where “activism” in the arts results in focus upon the artistic gesture, and
therefore the artist her/himself rather than the impacted community, an artistic
engagement with the aesthetics native to critical pedagogy prioritizes the quiet and
careful process of capacity building. Here, political action devised through organizing is
authored and performed by community members themselves, and only when the whole
community has obtained the capacity to develop and carry out that action.
Critical pedagogy’s commitment to organizing as a patient, measured, and
cyclical process that is equal parts reflection, critical analysis, dialogue, action should by

127
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 106.
128
By systemic incapacity, I mean, for example, illiteracy, language barriers, intimidation, etc.
129
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 65.

48
no means, however, be equated with passivity. Rather, the capacity for literacy, critical
thinking and articulation cultivated by critical pedagogy culminates in political self-
representation through speech: the process by which men and women author, and
perform the world-as-cultural-composition. Accordingly, as the speech act constitutes
humanity for Freire, deprivation of others’ access to speech is deprivation of human life.
This “dehumanization” is suffered both by the oppressed people robbed of their human
right to speech, but also by their oppressors.
130
Speech here is not meant as an allegory
for an ideal model of democracy. The very real stakes of speech can manifest as literally
life and death. As ACT UP’s AIDS cultural analysis teaches us, SILENCE = DEATH.

130
Ibid., 44.

49
Conclusion

In an interview regarding the Self Help Graphics meeting on art and gentrification
in Boyle Heights, critic Sue Belle Yank asked Elizabeth Blaney and Dont Rhine about
how Ultra-red deal with a question hotly debated in social practice discourse: how can
artists ethically and collaborate with communities? Dont replied,
Often, the entry point for artists and their institutions is to begin from a place of
self interest; what is the role of art?... Maybe asking how artists and the
community can work together is not the place to begin. Rather, let's begin by
listening to the histories that precede this moment. Let's make ourselves open to
learning how working poor residents of East Los Angeles have already created a
culture of resistance and community. Then artists can start to experiment with
ways to support those collective efforts that have already begun.
131

Ultra-red’s infusion of critical pedagogy into a practice based in the history, concepts,
and aesthetics of sound proposes a notion of community-based, collaborative art making
that is, first and foremost, accountable to community organizing efforts. The reflexive
socially- and politically-attuned listening developed in history and concepts of sound,
deployed according to a critical pedagogical strategy that requires: a renegotiation of
artistic authorship; a recognition of the everyday as an aesthetic composition; a utilization
of aesthetics as an awareness-building tool; and a tempered, measured pace that
prioritizes a cultivation of self-representation, yields a logic for an ethics of collaboration
that puts art at the service of communities and their self-organized causes. This

131
Sue Belle Yank, “How Can Artists and the Eastside Generate Change Together?,” KCET Artbound,
November 16, 2012. Accessed on February 28, 2013 at http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/los-
angeles/ultra-red-east-la-social-art-people.html

50
reframing of the role of artist and art in the community-organizing context approaches the
dynamic of emancipation imagined by Freire’s critical pedagogy. As Freire puts it, “It is
only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.”
132

132
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 56.

51
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Ultra-red is a contemporary sound art collective of twelve internationally-based justice organizers. Founded in 1994 during the AIDS crisis, Ultra-red’s activist sound art practice coalesced in the audio-documentation of a hypodermic needle exchange on the streets of Los Angeles. In 1997, Ultra-red joined Union de Vecinos, an L.A.-based organization of public housing residents, in the fight to prevent the Federally subsided demolition of their housing community, Aliso Village, in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of L.A. Core to Union de Vecinos’ conception of organizing is Brazilian literacy educator Paulo Freire’s theory of critical pedagogy, which conceives of organizing as a socially embedded, participatory alternative to conventional, hierarchical educational models. Ultra-red adopted Freire’s critical pedagogy as a framework for embedding their sound art practice in an ongoing investigation of the role of aesthetics in activist work. This thesis draws from precursors in the history of sound, such as John Cage’s 4’33” (1952), Pierre Schaeffer’s objet sonore, R. Murray Schafer’s acoustic ecology, and Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening, and from Freire’s critical pedagogy to analyze Ultra-red’s hybrid social justice and artistic practice.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Bray, Katherine (author)

Core Title Specifically sound: critical pedagogy and the sound art practice of Ultra-red

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Public Art Studies / Planning

Publication Date 04/26/2013

Defense Date 04/26/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag community organizing,critical pedagogy,John Cage,listening,OAI-PMH Harvest,Pauline Oliveros,Paulo Freire,Social Justice,social practice,sound art,Ultra-red

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Butler, Connie (committee chair), Herbst, Robby (committee member), Tain, John (committee member)

Creator Email brayk@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-245321

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Legacy Identifier etd-BrayKather-1610-0.pdf

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Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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