LIVE

SUPERMODEL | Discourse

all originals dj set for room2.fm

live online 24 September 2021

tysm to @anuraag69 and patrick hase for having me

www.room2.fm

salllvage for room2.fm

Naarm based DJ and community organiser Raag Bhatia leads a panel discussion with Rully Shabara (Senyawa), Rami Abadir (Abadir), and Rowan Savage (salllvage), exploring the common threads between traditional and hypermodern music, different cultural perspectives on sound and listening; the power of decentralisation; the importance of the human element in music; and how technology can be co-opted to move us deeper into the embodied sonic practice.

Recorded live at Greenhouse Studios, Petersham for SOFT CENTRE's inaugural UNFURL festival program. November, 2022.

@salllvage
@rami-abadir
@anuraag69

UNFURL PANEL | Rully Shabara, Rami Abadir, Rowan Savage, Raag Bhatia

SOFT.spot | SUPERMODEL 

@salllvage

'Wagahn (blackly we cry)' is a work of sonic mysticism pointing to the ways in which patterns of language exceed what is commonly understood (in Anglo-Western cultures) as 'the human.' Boundaries collapse between the human and the animal, between music and sound, between (human) language and (animal) cries. Ironically, the line between the 'natural' and the 'artificial' is itself artificial. Colonial technology speaks back against itself. The world is richer and more expansive than we know. 

Every sound in the piece is made and mutated entirely from my field recordings of crows (wagahn), made on my traditional Country (Kombumerri Country) - with the exception of vocals. These are fed through the Koup Music AI, trained on my voice, and on these crow field recordings, allowing a transformation of one into the other and back again. For blackfullas, we didn't name animals - they told us their names, and we listened. 'I' am not the author. The rhythms of crow calls come together in a cacophony of patterns, and mutate (through the magick of Ableton) into lapping sonic waves and bass groans. We don't need to 'do' deep listening, it's engulfing us already. 

The piece brings together Blak and European canons and bloodlines - the language of the birds, in particular, an occult concept given voice, a secret language of the French troubadours, a message descending to us from above ('It's in the trees! It's coming!'). The piece begins and ends with an interpolation of dialogue from Jean Rollin's 1978 film The Grapes of Death, a work where folk horror is also the technological horror of environmental exploitation when a culture has lost the will to know itself as being only a single part of the world. But this is not a place of cosmic pessimism. A Blak sun rises. "there are big rocks everywhere... they point toward the sky, as if they'd been planted there. we must walk toward the sun. we'll find a little path... the village isn't far."

Artwork: Henry Lai-Pyne | Eek

[SOFT.spot] Salllvage - Wagahn (blackly We Cry)

@jessikakhazrik

How does our disproportionate experience of energy wars and energicide affect our techno-political urgencies and imaginaries, as well as, the electronic music we make, or won’t make? 

How does the militarisation and corporatisation of the academic institute influence the disciplinary organization of knowledge and space, the production of ignorance and the philosophy of intelligence? What modes of attestation and temporalities of resistance do these regimes of in/visibility create, or dislocate when death can be increasingly slow, eruptive or automated depending on where you are on this universally dark planet? In this lecture, artist, educatress and technologist Jessika Khazrik shares “خريطة الظلام Cartography of Darkness”, a transclusive research platform dedicated to exploring universalisms and the dark unity of knowledge in our highly obfuscated and multiple crisis-ridden age. Launched in August 2023 on the third year memorial of the Beirut Port Blast with the urgently ongoing chapter “For a Trans-electric Solidarity”, the online cognitive mapping platform is comprised of a triad of interconnected, sonified spaces: a map, a periodical and a repository. These virtual spaces, that are continuously reactivated through multi-generational assemblies, workshops on cognitive mapping/counter-cartography and orgaraves, bring together various contributions that resist the agnogenic practices of militarisation. How do we heal our imagination in a global system that institutes separation and disseminates a seemingly functional ignorance all while promising an artificial intelligence?

Jessika Jamal Khazrik - خريطة الظلام Cartography of Darkness  | SUPERMODEL [Discourse]

How do we learn to speak to the non-human world? Anglo-Western paradigms tell us that there is a sharp divide between human and 'nature,' and that technology is what divides the human from the animal - or from plants, the landscape itself, and the world of gods and spirits. But all these assumptions can be turned against themselves: finding a way into Country, and finding kinship and speaking with all that is non-human, through digital recording, virtual archives, and AI learning. @salllvage (Rowan Savage) muses on performance practice across field recordings, vocal sonic transformations, reviving Aboriginal language, and deep listening, to present one path into postcolonial language practice beyond anthropocentrism.

Rowan Savage - Gurgun wagahn: speaking (in) crow | SUPERMODEL [discourse]

It's popular in literary circles to consider "autofiction" some sort of narcissistic, neoliberal fad. Done right, it’s the opposite. Autofiction, or what McKenzie Wark reframes as the 'autotextual', is a long tradition of writing in which the writer attempts to account, from within, for the historical circumstances that made them. Its experiments in accounting for subjectivity as a thing made by forces outside itself. 

"I think that's an important writerly method in an historical moment when the media that make us have become pervasive, distributed, and double as means of surveillance. Moreover, when almost everyone's textual product is being strip-mined by so-called AI to mimic the language of the human, it seems timely to look critically and intimately in what made us imagine we are humans in the first place." - McKenzie

Originally from Newcastle NSW, McKenzie Wark is a New York based writer and scholar specializing in media theory. Her books include A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory and Raving. Her current project is provisionally titled From Writing to Texting. She teaches at The New School for Social Research.

McKenzie Wark - Critical (Auto) Theory | SUPERMODEL [discourse]

Spaceship Earth 2.0 is a lecture and guided deep listening session by rhythmanylst DeForrest Brown, Jr. @speakermusic that elaborates on the themes and concepts behind his book 'Assembling a Black Counter Culture' (Primary Information, 2022), his sonic fictional album Techxodus (Planet Mu, 2023), his collaborations with techno visual artist AbuQadim Haqq as well as his in-progress writing for the meta-narrative of Cybotron’s military-scientific sonic fiction of Maintain the Golden Ratio (Tresor, 2023) and Parallel Shift (Tresor, 2024). Jazz, and its electronically modified antecedent of techno, operate within a vibra-pedagogical improvisation of techno-vernacular expression that envisions Afrofuturism as a hi-tech soulful operating system for engineering a myth-synoptic vision of other world-systems in saecular motion.

DeForrest Brown Jr. - Spaceship Earth 2.0 | SUPERMODEL [discourse]

AI is not a singular phenomenon. We talk about it as if it’s a monolithic identity, but it’s many, many different things – the fantasy partner chatbot whispering sweet virtual nothings in our ears, the algorithm scanning our faces at passport control, the playlists we’re served when we can’t be bothered to pick an album. The technology is similar in each case, but the networks, the datasets and the outcomes are all different.The same goes for art and music made using AI. We can listen to Frank Sinatra singing a cover of a rap song from beyond the grave, we can look at paintings made by robots, we can hang out in the comments section of a machine learning-generated death-metal livestream (‘sick drum solo bruh’). But the fact that artworks like these are made using AI doesn’t mean that they are all asking the same questions or have the same goals. We experience these works – and the way AI is used in them – in a multitude of ways. So how should we think about art and music made with AI? Instead of looking for a definitive approach, one clean (and/or hot) take to rule them all, perhaps we can try to think like the networks do – in higher dimensions. From multiple positions, simultaneously. Messily. Not one way of looking at AI, but many.

Jennifer Walshe - 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music | SUPERMODEL [discourse]

Gadigal / Sydney based arts organisation, est. 2017. Ecstatic encounters with art, sound and new media.