4 min, DV with audio, 2011

"Sonido Ruido" translates from the Spanish as "Sound Noise" or, better, "Noise Soundsystem," though
along the way it loses something. Best to keep it in the Spanish and enjoy the rhyming assonance and
rolling "R."

A sonido is a mobile soundsystem popular in Mexico, a party machine advertised by hand-lettered signs
on the sides of buildings. There's a certain variant of the sonido in downtown Mexico City that consists of
a handtruck with a stack of overdriven, homemade speakers and an mp3 cd player, all bungee-corded
together. Sonidos boom Euro or Afro-Latin bass from the front of businesses to attract customers,
sonideros toasting the day's sales on the mic. On a few central streets there are so many sonidos that to
distinguish themselves they bust out sound effect-laden themes and smoke machines.

The video Sonido Ruido is taken from an installation that adds video to the sonido tradition: a hand truck
holds a large, yellow crt tv atop a hand-lettered gallery pedestal; the gallery's cd player and a Behringer
guitar amp are precariously stacked and bungee-corded on top of the tv. It's a semimobile videosoundsystem,
a late-model technology party machine.

Sonido Ruido was shot on holiday in Mexico. It begins as travelogue, a jumpy handycam pan of a
coastline set to a beginner's piano lesson. Abruptly the beat kicks in and we embark on a journey through
the noise of experience, a kinetic vision of water and light breathing and bumping in and through layers of
people, places and things.

Sonido Ruido explores the tendancy to aestheticize one's experiences in a foreign or a native culture. It's
an attempt to use the nonverbal languages of video editing and music to work through and provide a
narrative for experience that is continually washed over by beautiful, untranslatable noise.

A Raleigh, NC native, Neill Prewitt learned to speak video art by teaching it at a high school in Mexico
City. He produces Yuxtapongo (aka "Acid Rain, Jr."), a monthly showcase for mostly local video artists on
Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, NC public access tv. He is currently focusing on performance and video
musics in the MFA program at UNC Chapel Hill.

More information, downloads, and video available at neillprewitt.com

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