To the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles

We write as members of Ultra-red, the sound art collective responsible for the five protocols for organized listening presented in fulfillment of the COLA Fellowship awarded to Dont Rhine for the year 2010-2011. While the Department of Cultural Affairs awards the COLA Fellowships to individual artists, Dont Rhine's artistic practice has occurred exclusively within Ultra-red since 1994. The sound objects and works on paper exhibited in the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery result from collaborations between Rhine and other members of the collective.

Ultra-red investigates how organized sound organizes listening. Our sound art practice aims to better understand the terms for phenomenological re-organizations of collective experience through rigorous practices of listening. We do not ground our claim to be sound artists in the orthodoxy of the ear, which privileges a solitary and often de-contextualized encounter with composed sound. Rather, we focus on the conditions of collective listening, a concern common to our performances, textual scores (or protocols), video and print works, as well as recordings.

We bring to our investigations our own collectivity as well as long-term collaborations with constituencies engaged in a range of political struggles. Ultra-red's earliest sound pieces were made by Rhine and Marco Larsen with the Los Angeles needle exchange, "Clean Needles Now." In 1997 we began an ongoing partnership with Elizabeth Blaney and Leonardo Vilchis from the social justice organization "Union de Vecinos." The protocols for organized listening in the Barnsdall Gallery have been composed, experimented with and revised through collective inquiries begun in 2009 in Glasgow, London, New York, Berlin, Dundee, and Oslo with constituencies addressing conditions of poverty, racism, migration, and sexual and gender oppressions.

Each protocol begins in silence. In this silence we hear echoed contradictions described by Zapatista rebels: "Power uses silence to hide his [sic] crimes. We use silence to listen to one another, to touch one another, to know one another." We offer these protocols to the Department of Cultural Affairs as an invitation to constituencies in Los Angeles to employ organized listening as a procedure for the production of knowledge and collective action against the structural inequalities that bankrupt our public institutions, destabilize our neighborhoods, inflict precarity on workers and their communities, and confine artists to the tautologies of the status quo.

Toward that encounter and that knowledge, Ultra-red presents the five protocols in multiple variations.

Ultra-red

1. La La Press provided the letterpress for the three "Protocols for Fieldwork" and Los Angeles artist Karen Fiorito aided in the screen-printing of the three "Protocols for Sound Walks." Dont Rhine's mother, artist Janice Rhine, contributed to the collage work in the three "Protocols for Sound Objects." Creative Packaging provided the offset-printing for the limited edition easel pads, "What did you hear?"

2. While Larsen left the collective in late 1998, both Blaney and Vilchis joined Ultra-red in January 2001. Other current members of the collective include Manuela Bojad_ijev (Berlin), Pablo Garcia (Los Angeles), Janna Graham (London), X-Chris Jones (London), Elliot Perkins (Torbay, England), and Robert Sember (New York).

3. Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, "The Word and the Silence: October 12, 1995," in Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings, ed. Juana Ponce de León (NY: Seven Stories Press, 2001): 76.