INTRODUCTION.
 

In the summer of 1999, an important outerspace expedition was failing. Everything was prepared so that NASA would distribute, live and via Internet, the images of Mars' surface that would have to be taken with the cameras of the Pathfinder probe. With everything, thereís at least an aspect in which the failure of the mission was assured.
Attending different demands, NASA had successfully installed a microphone in the surface probe. This intended to recover for the first time in history the sounds of Mars. In any event, it doesnít seem that this was a primary objective. In fact, the microphone would only function ten seconds each day.

As Victor Nubla has pointed out, the categories of tolerance in the diverse forms of communication, and in the arts, are those of social education of the senses. Assured institutionally, these categories depend in turn on their capacity to be used as vehicules of transmission and reproduction of culture. Such mechanisms operate as much in the case of the scientific and social prejudices, as in the asthetic ones that dominate the art world. Daily observation constantly shows us constructions that seem to respond to a hierarchy of senses, establishing relations of power in the area of expression and culture. The analisis of art and its current mechanisms do not take into account this problem and because of this, seem to be tangled in a great misunderstanding about the meaning of whatís visual and audible. This misunderstanding has been impelled from the system of art itself. In 1980 the Museum of Modern Art of the Villa of Paris, organized Écouter par les yeux, a large exposition whose title has confirmed the only form in which certain institutions seem disposed to accept music in the contemporary art world.
Clearly, lots of the existing confusion has been created by the music world itself. Faced with the challenge of precision of nature of the audible object due to Pierre Schaeffer, complex in detail but not transparent in its principal argument, large part of creation and musical criticism of the past few decades has contributed in large part to the confusion of which we speak. This sirves as an illustration which drifts from the concept of audible sculpture, since its initial meaning destined itself to outline the spatial perception of sound to its present consideration, as common, as a mere naming of an object or a visible artefact that, otherwise, sounds. A similar reflexion should be made on another famous concept, that of the audible landscape. After the confusion between the audible ecology and the asthetic experience, or to put it another way, between the conclusions of the studies of ambiental impact and liberty of artistic creation, Murray Schafer and his epigone conservationists have come to impel what Francisco López has called the dissipation of music. Luckily, Michel Chion has had the wisdom to explore thoroughly the extension of a misunderstanding that only seems to be maintained out of danger from poets.

On the state of things that we are sketching, John Cageís great shadow will be projected. Exalted quickly by the establishment of world culture as the most relevant thinker of music of our times, his invested interventions of a special authority, seemed to offer music a place in contemporary art in which everything seemed possible. In front of burocratic drift of certain contemporary European music subjected to the servant like errands for orchestras of big national festivals and music shows of the chamber of provinces, Cage may favor the rise of a great asthetic renovation, whose ambivalent effects will be felt from here to come. Not in vain, upon acting as the end of predetermined music, and impelling the naturalization of the musical experience at the cost of its silence, Cageís work will close as many doors as it will open. Under his inspiration, the group Fluxus will promote the renovation of audible art of the sixties and seventies with the introduction of musical and paramusical elements in different artistic expressions. Those type of protests of formal radicalism were well received in a closed art world formed by museum directors, critics and gallery owners. However one can affirm that in an ambiguos context to the material and simbolic recognition of the deemed audible art, many preferred to renounce being musicians to being artists who renounce being artists to continue being musicians. Upon making known that the valorization of his work was seen displaced from the music itself to the repertory of its possible functionalities, or to the artifices of its mere annunciation and in scene, many decided to reconsider his work, displacing himself towards the plastic arts, or taking the diverse conceptualisms as a means of escape. An instance very akin to what surged a few decades later with multimedia art.

Meanwhile, the condescending treatment of music in the art world, and the character, letís say, contained in many of the asthetic proposals that, after such hibridizations, situate themselves halfway between visual art and audible art, contrast with the spectacular reconsideration of the value of sound that have fullfilled in the past years the mass media, advertising, or the large entertainment industry. Television advertisments, the impressive audio equipment of the modern movie theaters, cellular phones, the video game market, or the infinite varieties of music of consumption, confirm, from different perspectives, industrial unfolding, in the context of century change, of everything new and sophisticated, social engineering dedicated to exploit until the limit of all possible and imagined funcionalities of sound. Like so, itís no surprise that some encounter in the spectacularization like the superproductions of Hollywood, or in the cunning emotions that search for slot machines, the best possible exit to resolve for good, definitively, the so called new music crisis. That complex reality establishes pressure on musical creation that operates in very disparate dominions.

Subjected frequently to a mere ambientation of funds of television documentaries, resourse to choreografic creations, or decorative elements in the closing parties of the Internacional Art Fairs and the grand festivals Techno, music seems to remain alone. Although, itís worth saying that perhaps it only seems that way. Ahead of the gregarious following of the directors of cultural politics of  institutions, the adaptation to the ìlogicî of the world market of the cultural industry, or the condescendence of the establishment  of the art world, the music of creation has seen itself forced to find original forms of recognition and valorization that may be assured, by means of diverse tactic operations, their survival. Like so, inspite of all dificulties, that in the past decades has gone cristalizing itself, in the margins of the system, a real transnational network of art music, place or, if one prefers, not a meeting place for artists with disparate trajectories, united by their will to question the formal truths, and to assume the associated risks to the artistic creation confronted by any given kind of previous conditioning.

Twas the objetive to reflect on the situation that we have just finished sketching that was celebrated in the summer of 2000, in the Center of Artistic Experimentation ëLugar Comumí, located in the old gunpowder factory of Barcarena, close to Lisbon, an international gathering of audible artists under the title Clariaudiencias III. Jointly organized by the Portuguese Arts and Ideas club/íLugar Comumí, and ëGracia Territori Sonorí, the encounter was directed by the composer and multifaceted creator Catalan Victor Nubla, and received the participation, among others, of Io Casino, Anton Ignorant, Francisco López, and Kasper Toeplitz. Just like in past ocassions, celebrated in the Quinzena díArt de Montesquiu (QUAM) in 1998, and Hangar (Barcelona) in 1999, Clariaudiencias III was an encounter dedicated to reflect and experience contemporary musical creation, after the reading, discussion, and common reflexion within an international group of creators with very diverse approximations. The text that is offered hereby constitutes the travel plan of exploration of the audible world that Victor Nubla proposed to us. A short but well meditated essay, whose aphoristic nature, between magic and poetic, declares the rejection of the beginning of the adjusting of art to the functional and normative necessities of the social system, and in consecuence of its transformation in design, and opposes itself lively to the pretension of reducing the esthetic experience to a mere accessory manifestacion of the antropology of consumption.