Infernal Noise Brigade

When a group like the Infernal Noise Brigade enters public space, it transforms the space, bringing life back to the streets, trains, or buses, giving people a reason to enjoy as their sounds resonant within listeners. Even as I sat at my computer watching clips of their marches, I felt their music within me and it gave me the chills, as if pumping energy into my body. The music was powerful and inspirational; it made me want to be a part of the movement. The artistic creation’s potential lies in getting people’s attention and causing a reaction in street performances and thus is an aesthetic based on relations and experiences. It provokes the public to participate in their performance, raise awareness and concern of political events, and an understanding or feeling of a collective life in hopes that its liveliness will carry into one’s day to day life.

Everything today is done to make money, and when such a time and energy investment is made to something that does not yield profits, shows their true commitment to what they believe in. Groups like INB are initiated by people who care, who want to bring pure, fun, live entertainment to people who can’t always get it, with timing that makes a bigger statement. The marches were done as carnivalesque protests; they grabbed people’s attention and thus a greater overall awareness of certain political events. It was nonetheless entertainment, but they weren’t trying to engage a particular audience at a particular time. It wasn’t like going to a concert; people weren’t always aware they were coming. They engaged anyone around who can listen or see whose life is interrupted by the commotion. They wanted to see who is accepting of the noise, who enjoys it, who will participates in it just by listening or dancing and who will be disregard or not like it and want it to stop. There could never be a specific response and this fact that they are never quite sure how the masses will react to their performance plays a role in the unexpectedness of relations within a given space. In street performances they, as Stevphen Shukaitis notes, “break down the wall between artistic activity as separate or removed from daily life because these forms can be inscribed within the flow of people’s everyday experience.” Their performance is based on potential relations with the space they are in and the interactions with people they are around, which is a part of the self-evolving artistic creation. This all contributes to the ephemeral characteristics of street performances, “predicated on the intervention or opening into a system of relations, connecting innovations that are passed along and mutated through the modulation of the relations in which they exist,” as Shukaitis states so well.

Private spaces would have inherently restricted some of the general public. The wall between and artistic performance and everyday experience would have stayed in tack as it clearly separates the artist and the viewer. The performance would have been tamed and controlled. If it were in a gallery or theater setting, it would lose its spontaneity because to some extent what is done in these spaces is expected, and those who expect it go to see it. It doesn’t allow people to be genuinely surprised by it and doesn’t give them the chance to react to it in the same why they might on the street. Thus they tend remain an observer in the gallery or theatre instead of becoming involved in the artistic creation in performances.

I watched a video a few years ago that had interesting ideas as far as entertainment is concerned: that all sports, music, television shows, movies, performances, etc are being used to distract us from what the government is doing. We fall back into our homes, courts, stadiums, theaters constantly and pay attention to more entertainment than the politics that control our lives. Without our attention as a whole, the government could get away with anything. When there is a street performance, however, we get the best of both worlds because it draws attention to political situations while entertaining and bringing the public together. On the streets, the audience is better able to identify with the performance causing an affective composition within both the performer and the viewer, a connection that is sometimes lost in a private setting. Street performances allow public spaces to be shared for a collective experience instead of individually like in private spaces. This in itself is also political because it works against the traditional and conventional distribution of ideas, images, and relations, as Shukaitis notes.

The people within the street performing groups generally use nicknames to hide their identities from employers because of negative associations. It is never really known who comprises groups like INB, allowing them a certain amount of anonymity. This does not question authorship because the performances aren’t about the individual, and they aren’t even about the group. It is more about their influence on the public, raising awareness in themselves and their surroundings. As individuals they are anonymous but as a group they are known and they try to influence people during particular situations because of the situation itself.

Because the articles and video clip were more focused on the action, I was left questions about the cause and how effective the Infernal Noise Brigade was in particular as far as politics was concerned. The most surprising thing to me about the street performances was the reactions they received from police. For their music making, dancing, rifle twirling, and energy to provoke and threaten cops so much to do a thing like tear gassing them shocks me because it seems like their attention-grabbing behavior to get people to enjoy themselves, others, and the music was innocent. Marching down a street is so non-violent that it makes the police look like they over-reacted to a performance that brings enjoyment and awareness on many levels including consciousness and politics, two things that are necessary for a well-lived life.