Sonic Acts 2019: Lectures & Discussions

On the wall of Maryam Monalisa Gharavi’s studio is a still from Buñuel’s ‘Los Olvidados’, showing a blind man staring at a chicken. In the latest episode of the Overexposed Podcast, , made in collaboration with Sonic Acts, Andrea Gonzalez talks to Monalisa about demonology, infrastructure and how any blockage to the vision of regimes that govern by making visible, is seen as a threat. Addressing the similarities between the commodities oil and data, Monalisa points to extraction as a defining factor of capitalism. Reading from her manuscript ‘Exhaust’, she states: ‘Capital is dead labor, vampire-like, living only by sucking living labor.”

Sonic Acts hosts six participants in the home-based residency programme 'Overexposed' which deals with pollution and its effects on everything living and non-living.

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist, poet, and theorist whose work deals with the paradoxes of our interactions with matter and immateriality, the seen and unseen, underlying everyday life and its common preconceptions.
Read more about her work here.

Andrea Gonzalez hosted and produced this episode for Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee.

Extractive Logic with Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

On the dark wet pavement, in between reflections of flickering streetlights and leaves decomposing, we find Valley Radio 071; a compilation carrying the essence of this late November, brought to us by the exceptional SITOI (@sitoi). 

"SITOI is a multidisciplinary artist in the field of experimental music and contemporary art. She uses performance art to manifest her eerie-yet-compelling visions of vulnerability, carnality and social structures through intricate poetry and dark disjointed production. SITOI enjoys a sweaty and purifying rave amongst classic and harsh techno but finds pleasure and inspiration also e.g. in noise, ambient, avantgarde pop and wrenching experimental club music." 

You can find the mix on our Soundcloud and as always we highly recommend taking some time to dive into SITOI her other works as well. 

Tracklist:
Dog Days - Varg, Ziúr & Puce Mary
Burning Feather - Eartheater
Economy of Freedom - Yves Tumor
No Idols - VISIONIST
Everything for Everyone - KABLAM
New Ways To Love - Holly Herndon
See The Light (ft. queendyster) - APEAK
Intro - Noform (Hålbå Remix)
Inhale, Suffocate - 111X
SKIN TIGHT - SLIKBACK X VAN BOOM
Atrocity (Grievance As A Substitute For Existence) - Exploited Body

Image courtesy of artist
Layout by Oliva Rawlings

Valley Radio 071 - SITOI

London-based DJ, producer and UIQ boss Lee Gamble pays tribute to groundbreaking composer Alvin Lucier, who died earlier this month, aged 90.

Find out more on crackaud.io: crackm.ag/3y9An5y
Still Independent. Help us keep it that way: crackm.ag/support

Alvin Lucier tribute – Mixed by Lee Gamble

I used Ableton's Operator synth's white noise and sine wave in A3 (220Hz in frequency) pitch to test and calibrate the spatialization of the 5.1 speaker setup in the project space of MACA during my residency there, building up for "Latent amongst the Air", a project commissioned by Sonic Acts Festival. Because of the unusual shape and structures of the space, I had to figure out some way to measure its acoustics + unconventional placement of the 5.1 speakers setup I was using.

But then a fun idea occurred to me to amplify(or abuse?) the project space's acoustic characteristics and spatiality furthermore with a waveform that is a bit more complex(sawtooth wave) and hence suspected that this would yield interesting aliasings and excite certain partials, creating "ghost melodies" of the space... 
In fact, when the project was under "installation mode" prior to the performance, this is what was being looped.

On Sunday afternoon 29-05-22 before the last round of performances, with help of Anne, I decided to record some improvisation with the space in this manner.
So here it goes, tuning of a space, which are latent melodies from partials of the pedal tone of A3 in SAW64 wave recapitulated by the project space of MACA while it's circulating around the room through the 5 speakers at the rate of 0.09 Hz speed. What's being stacked on top of A3 pitch as chords are some impromptu counterpoints on top to introduce some nice interference just for fun. Slight attenuation and phasing of the composition were probably also a contribution of Anne who was walking around and exploring the space with the recording device in place of my two feet and ears that were bounded by the hands playing keys behind the laptop...

Tuning Of A Space - During "Latent Amongst The Air" Sonic Acts Residency at MACA, Amsterdam 052922

Drawing from notes and recordings made during the Sonic Acts residency programme Overexposed x Lives of Deltas, sound artist Minji Kim aka Unknown Kim tells us about her ongoing research into the sonic qualities of the Zandmotor 'sand engine' experiment in the Netherlands. In this episode of the Overexposed Podcast made by Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee radio, Andrea Gonzalez speaks with Minji Kim, discussing the interplay between human life and the environment, the sonic qualities of wind and the use of auditory technologies in tracing diverse forms of decay.

Overexposed Podcast by Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee interviews participants of Sonic Acts’ OVEREXPOSED artistic research residency about artefacts that have moved their artistic practice in a lasting way.

Eavesdropping Environmental Crises with Minji Kim

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER
Irit Rogoff – Becoming Research
22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

with an introduction by Lucas van der Velden.

'Research' as we experience it now in both institutional and culturally active contexts has moved away from stable bodies of knowledge to be excavated as well as away from recognised subjects whose validity is universally recognised. ‘Research’ models emanating from practice have ceased to be the context or the preparation for work and have become the main event of activity. These have had significant impact on so many arenas of knowledge production across the humanities and the social sciences and have countered the bordering and continents of knowledge towards platforms of shared subjectivity. ‘Research’ is now the arena in which we negotiate knowledge that we have inherited with the conditions of our lives. Those conditions, whether economic, geographical or propelled by subjectivity, have become the drive (not the subject matter) of the work. Through immersion in conditions, ‘research’ transforms from an investigative impulse to the constitution of new realities. It is thus that we recognise that ‘research’ is not some elevated activity requiring a great deal of prior knowledge, nor is it simply the urge to ‘find things out’. It is in many ways the stuff of daily life. The forms of current research have equally shifted, as contemporary, multivalent ‘research’ moves between archival, documentary, conceptual and performative modes, and utilises everything from fictioning, docu-dramatising to mimicry the queer animation of archives and structural self-instituting to produce new realities of knowledge.

Irit Rogoff is a writer, teacher, theorist and curator. She is Professor of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, a department she founded in 2002. Rogoff works at the meeting ground between contemporary practices, politics and philosophy. Her current work is on new practices of knowledge production and their impact on modes of research, under the title of Becoming Research (forthcoming). As part of the collective freethought, Rogoff was one of the artistic directors of The Bergen Assembly, 2016 and editor of The Infrastructural Condition published in its wake. Rogoff is also co-founder of The European Forum for Advanced Practices in 2017. Her publications include Looking Away – Participating Singularities, Ontological Communities (2013), Visual Cultures as Seriousness (2013) (with Gavin Butt), Unbounded: Limits’ Possibilities (2012), Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (2000).

Sonic Acts 2019: Irit Rogoff – Becoming Research

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER
Didier Debaise – Out of Nature. How a Concept Became a Political Power?
22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

with an introduction by Rick Dolphijn.

The moderns have invented ‘nature’ and have made it one of their most important political institutions. Didier Debaise will revisit this very singular adventure through which a number of local inventions, gestures, and operations, namely within experimental systems, have given birth to a new political force. Disconnecting this nature from the very conditions of its emergence and existence, the moderns have instantiated it as an essential actor within the processes of normalisation of practices and as a crucial instrument justifying the extension of their impact on all other territories. Today the question then has become the following: How to resist the hegemonic tendencies of this modern version of nature in order to reinstate space and restore legitimacy to other ways of inhabiting the Earth.

Didier Debaise is a permanent researcher at the Fonds National de la Recherché Scientifique (FNRS) and the director of the Centre of Philosophy at Free University of Brussels (ULB) where he teaches contemporary philosophy. He is the co-founder, with I. Stengers, of the Groupe d’études constructivistes (Geco). His main areas of research are contemporary forms of speculative philosophy, theories of events, and links between American pragmatism and the French contemporary philosophy. He is director of a collection in Presses du réel, member of the editorial board of the journal Multitudes and Inflexions. He wrote three books on Whitehead’s philosophy, edited volumes on pragmatism, on the history of contemporary metaphysics, and he wrote numerous papers on Bergson, Tarde, Souriau, Simondon, and Deleuze. Two of his books are translated in English: Nature as Event and A Speculative Empiricism. He is working on a new book called Pragmatique de la terre.

Sonic Acts 2019: Didier Debaise – Out of Nature. How a Concept Became a Political Power?

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER
Susanne M. Winterling – Gravitational Currents and The Life Magic
22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

with an introduction by Rick Dolphijn

In her conference talk, Susanne M. Winterling will show some of her recent works including Planetary Opera In Three Acts, Divided By The Currents (2018), a composition of sounds, natural and synthetic, documentary and imaginary. The composition includes hydrophone recordings of dinoflagellates, the sound of green turtles hatching, crabs rubbing their claws together and other ecological marvels. Enacted is a sensory inversion of the dominant anthropocentric dynamics that governs our sensual and political consciousness. What if we try to reverse the scale and focus, and deploy historical forms of media, usually associated with the internal human drama, to express the drama of the planet instead? Sensors of change and actors in climate change, the tiny protozoa in this imaginary aim to generate a new sense of interspecies alliance; a connection to blur the nature-culture division, the entangled social and ecological conflicts and actual structures reproducing violence. Let’s join the creatures that dwell within planetary space and through the currents.

Susanne M. Winterling was born and works in Rehau, Germany. Working across a variety of media including film, photography, sculpture and performance, Winterling is primarily known for her time-based installations which critically engage the representation of reality. Prevailing modernist concepts, power structures and hierarchical historiographies are captured and investigated in her work in the form of spatial constellations. With an emphasis on enhancing our perceptual and critical consciousness, Winterling undertakes affective and material-based research that highlights the subjective interaction between producers, viewers, materials and species in our ecology. Recent exhibitions include ICA Philadelphia, MIT List Center Boston, Contour Biennale, Empty Gallery HongKong, TBA21 Vienna, MoMa Dubrovnik, etc.

Sonic Acts 2019: Susanne M. Winterling – Gravitational Currents and The Life Magic

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER
Rick Dolphijn – (The Earth Demands) The Necropolitics of Art
22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

with an introduction by Lucas van der Velden 

'The present… is what we are, and thereby, what already we are ceasing to be.' (Deleuze and Guattari)

In the first part of this talk, Rick Dolphijn will discuss the necropolitics of art. He will talk of the difficult relation that art has with the present and why the power of art is not ‘finite’ (not limited to any form of ‘extension’). Art shares this ‘infinity’ only with philosophy. This ‘infinity’ also shows that art does not run parallel to a human life, that it knows no beginning (birth) or end (death), but that it keeps on negotiating its relationship to the present. The second part of the talk claims that art therefore is, necessarily a philosophy of nature and that it envisions for us another world (which was always already there).

Rick Dolphijn is an associate professor based at Humanities, Utrecht University, with an interest in transdisciplinary research at large. He wrote Foodscapes, Towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption (2004), New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies with Iris van der Tuin (2012) and is finishing his new monograph The Cracks of the Contemporary; A Meditation on Art, Wounds and a Damaged Earth. He edited This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life with Rosi Braidotti (2014 – 5) and Philosophy after Nature (2017). Most recently he published and edited volume entitled Michel Serres and the Crises of the Contemporary. At Sonic Acts Academy 2018, Dolphijn curated a conference block What, of Art, Belongs to the Present? with students and scholars from the Research School for Media Studies (RMeS). This year, he is joining Sonic Acts as an organiser of the large project including a seminar Exploring Death… and Ways to Live, close reading session Still Alive and Already Dead and a workshop A Necropolitics of Life (RMeS, February), with a final output at the Sonic Acts conference featuring lectures by Rosi Braidotti and Susanne M. Winterling.

Sonic Acts 2019: Rick Dolphijn – (The Earth Demands) The Necropolitics of Art

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER
Rosi Braidotti – Necropolitics and Ways of Dying
22 February 2019 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

with an introduction by Rick Dolphijn.

What does it mean to die within the posthuman convergence, which positions us – humans and non-humans – between the Fourth Industrial Age and the Sixth Extinction? This contemporary convergence results in the shifting of boundaries between bio-power and necro-politics, life and death, the government of the living and the practices of dying. I will refer to a neo-materialist philosophy of non-human life as 'Zoe' and argue that both the concept of life and that of death need to be approached with more complexity and more attention to power differences.

Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. Her publications include: Patterns of Dissonance (1991), Metamorphoses (2002), Transpositions (2006), La philosophie, lá où on né l’attend pas (2009), Nomadic Subjects (1994; 2011), Nomadic Theory (2011), The Posthuman (2013). She recently co-edited Conflicting Humanities (2016) with Paul Gilroy and The Posthuman Glossary (2018) with Maria Hlavajova.

Sonic Acts 2019: Rosi Braidotti – Necropolitics and Ways of Dying

Sonic Acts is an interdisciplinary arts organisation based in Amsterdam.

Sonic Acts 2019: Rosi Braidotti – Necropolitics and Ways of Dying

Sonic Acts

Related tracks