CENSE
CENSE ALMANAC download
https://cense.earth/download/cense-almanac-2021.pdf
Grey Area is one of funding members of the Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies (CENSE), and accordingly signed the Accord at 1st December 2018 in Budapest.
The position of the Silent Manifesto is that the world faces a tragic paradox. As humanity drowns in its own noise and faces a scarcity of silence, we are failing to observe the quiet transformation of the living sound landscape into an auditory desert. The ubiquity of excess noise is an inherent side effect of other forms of environmental pollution, including industrialised manufacturing, agriculture and transport, all of which lead to a degradation of health and the rapid loss of diversity in animal populations which include species of insects, birds, amphibians and fish, all of which make up essential components of thriving, singing ecosystems.
Silent Manifesto
Listening will help us reconnect to the environment. If we can understand what listening can do to reconnect us to our environment, we can understand what's happening to our environment.
Hildegard Westerkamp
We, the attendees of the Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies (CENSE) conference in Budapest, believe that now is the time to join together as a network of individual voices coming from various backgrounds, such as art, music, natural science, the humanities, environmental studies, activism, and the like. In these times of global environmental peril we propose this new network to fill a need, that of fostering more perceptive and conscious ideas and solutions, addressing developments in the social and cultural fields of Europe. We accept the framework of sonic ecologies, which strives to bring about positive social, political and environmental change. In so doing, we emphasize the role of sound and listening, in the broadest sense of those terms, in understanding the world and our current fragile situation in it.
We believe that the field of sonic ecologies, like sound in general, is transdisciplinary, holistic, beyond national borders or gender, and unaligned in its essence. Our approach to realizing the importance of sonic ecologies includes the following:
- interdisciplinary research and practice in the arts and the cultural management, and its global dissemination;
- the introduction, conceptualization and promotion of innovative frameworks for institutional and community research and education; and
- a socially and culturally engaged advocacy for the realization of policy making, as well as the civil monitoring of any enacted policies that protect threatened ecologies in any place on Earth, especially in the area of Central Europe.
In the CENSE network, the position of the artist, researcher or educator working within the framework of sonic ecologies disengages from a solitary individual practice. The artist emerges into a broad array of possible practices, dedicated to the development of a community and interdisciplinary consciousness, urging a much needed transformation of the prevailing and problematic attitudes towards our environment and the safeguarding of all of nature, including ourselves.
We emphasize sonic ecologies as a conception analogous to networks of living organisms and objects existing in complex relationships with the environment, where technology is interwoven into almost every sector of a contemporary world that nonetheless remains closely tied to nature. At the center of this conception we examine resonances and sonic manifestations as evidence for an omnipresent array of things. The means of listening gives us a key to revealing subtle consonances or imbalances during our interactions, individual or collective, with the world as it is.
Furthermore, embedded in the vast and incomprehensible sphere that encompasses all of nature, even that which is detectable neither by human senses nor instruments, we propose an enlargement of existing notions of culture.
Further, we aim to examine various forms of resistance, and the deconstruction and de-contextualization of power structures as yet another subject of sonic ecologies. With this political agenda in mind, the interconnected arenas of action may embrace science, network culture, data, site-specific art, technology, advocacy and social interaction, reflecting a broad spectrum of interests.
CENSE is established to foster, support and move forward such interactions through the means of the framework of sonic ecologies.
PROGRAM & AGENDA for the near future
The CENSE organisation committee is at work on the next interdisciplinary gathering, scheduled for October 2019, and hosted by the Faculty of Art and Design of the University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně (UJEP) in Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic. The gathering will be a three-day event (date and location still negotiated) with the goal of bringing together more artists, scientists, natural resource managers, especially from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, to explore the way that sound can extend our understanding of the environment.
The gathering will be organized by CENSE and UJEP, any partners and collaborators are welcome.
CENSE will establish legal status in the coming months and will secure basic funding for its projects.
The Temporary CENSE Board members are so far: Csaba Hajnóczy, Miloš Vojtěchovský, Manja Ristić, Darko Fritz, Lloyd Dunn.
The Temporary Board was formed spontaneously (in the pre-legal-registration phase of the organization) to initiate the authoring of this Silent Manifesto for CENSE. We would like to establish a legally registered working group. All those who are interested should join in the communication with the group. Every topic of discussion concerning the future of CENSE will be adopted by general consensus of the group.
January 2019
Accord
(This document was signed by participants of the CENSE Founding conference, Budapest, December 1, 2018.)
The Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies (CENSE) brings together organizations and individuals who focus on the importance of sound in the context of environmental concerns, socio-cultural development and contemporary art practices.
By means of education, research, art and activism, CENSE seeks to increase the public sensitivity and awareness of listening, with the goal of moving toward a more aware and responsible society, one that is concerned for the implications of our rapidly changing soundscapes.
CENSE includes artists, researchers, scholars, cultural actors, interested individuals, and organizations from throughout Europe. The founding members are based in Beograd (SRB), Bucharest (RO), Budapest (HU), Cluj (RO), Copenhagen (DK), Korčula (CRO), Kraków (PL), Ljubljana (SLO), London (UK), Maribor (SLO), Nitra (SK), Paris (FR), Pécs (HU), Prague (CZ), Rijeka (CRO), Toruń (PL), Ústí nad Labem (CZ), Warsaw (PL), Wrocław (PL), Zagreb (CRO), and Židlochovice (CZ).
CENSE is open to new members who share the same or similar concerns.
CENSE strives to highlight the importance of mutually shared resources, sustainability and a more balanced coexistence among human and non-human agents. Raising awareness about sonic ecologies is a crucial step in the formulation of better solutions for the development of contemporary societies.
CENSE fosters interdisciplinary and cross-border collaboration. It does so by means of events, including annual meetings in various locations, artistic productions and interventions, publications, as well as educational and research activities.
CENSE Conference, Budapest, Hungary, December 1, 2018.
