@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]

Tuesday 28 January 2025
CTM 2025
radialsystem

Beth Coleman and Maurice Jones in conversation with Clara Herrmann

The rise of large-scale generative AI has driven powerful actors to push for narrative closure and technical stabilisation, marking a return to the black box after a brief period of openness. 

Universalising solutions to the governance, technical development, and creative application of AI reinforce a particular normative stance—a visual, linguistic, or sonic »middle ground« that mirrors a statistical norm of representation.

In this talk artist-researchers Beth Coleman, Romi Morrison, and Maurice Jones explore the ideas behind the Wilding AI Lab which resist normative middle grounds in envisioning technologies »that can be free—if not to imagine then to generate—speeding through possibilities, junctures that are idiotic until they are not.« (B. Coleman, 2021).

Additional Materials

Video impression of Wilding AI lab as mentioned by Beth Coleman around 15 minutes into the talk: https://www.ctm-festival.de/fileadmin/images/CTM_Festival_2025/Theory/Soundcloud_Materials/Caspar_Stracke_MONOM.mp4

View Beth Coleman's presentation slides: https://www.ctm-festival.de/fileadmin/images/CTM_Festival_2025/Theory/Soundcloud_Materials/COLEMAN_WILDING_No_Innocent_Models_JAN25_.pdf

CTM 2025: Wilding AI 1 – Generative Aesthetics Across Creative Domains

Tuesday 28 January 2025
CTM 2025
radialsystem

Daniela Huerta, Pía Baltazar, Sahar Homami in conversation with William Russell

After conceptually exploring the wilder territories of AI this talk invites members of the Wilding AI collective to situate their own artistic practice in relation to wildness and share concrete examples of the material and hands-on experimentation that went on during the four days of the Wilding AI Lab.
Multimedia artist, sound designer, and DJ Daniela Huerta (baby vulture) explores the pivotal role of storytelling in shaping our collective present reality and future trajectories. Audiovisual artist/programmer, calligrapher, and researcher Sahar Homami explores the boundaries of AI’s creative potential by incorporating themes of spiritual love and collective human experience. Intermedia composer, indisciplinary researcher, and directress of research-creation at the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), Pía Baltazar explores how machine-learning can enhance creative techniques of intersensoriality and embodiment.
Moderated by William Russell, Co-Founder and Creative Director of MONOM—Berlin's center for spatial sound, the talk will highlight in particular how artistic practices inspired by the AI of wildness translate when working with 4DSOUND and spatial audio environments.

Additional Resources:
Video shown by Daniela Huerta: https://vimeo.com/1055837929
Video shown by Sahar Homami: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3gP1uwamGM&ab_channel=SaharHomami
Video shown by Pía Baltazar: https://vimeo.com/piabaltazar/abreathingvoidexcerpt

CTM 2025: Wilding AI 2 – Mythology, Love and Intersensoriality

Tuesday 28 January 2025
CTM 2025
radialsystem

Michael Salu and James Ginzburg in conversation with Lina Martin-Chan

This session presents a literary anthology inspired by Italo Calvino’s 1967 essay »Cybernetics and Ghosts,« which provocatively suggested that writing could one day become a computationally reducible process, speculating that machines might eventually become sophisticated enough to reimagine the singular author’s human’ parameters’ and write literature with the same dexterity as us.

Edited by writer and artist Michael Salu, the anthology Cybernetics, or Ghosts? includes 15 short stories by writers across the globe that reimagine Calvino’s ideas in the context of modern AI and creativity. What will become of the human author? With the digital age now spanning decades and computation determining almost every aspect of our lives, do we think clearly and imaginatively enough about our relationship with machines?

Subtext co-founder James Ginzburg complements the book with a sister music compilation, responding to the anthology’s stories with contributions from the label’s current and forthcoming artists, as well as from artists that were instrumental to the label’s beginnings. The compilation—featuring voices like PYUR, Roly Porter, Zi​ú​r, KMRU & Aho Ssan—mirrors the text’s inquiries with a polyphonic exploration of technology’s impact on art and culture.

In conversation and including short readings and clips from the compilation, Salu and Ginzburg will present this rich, intricate web of collective and sonic storytelling, contemplating the many ways myth and technology shape the human condition.

CTM 2025: Cybernetics, Or Ghosts?

Wednesday 29 January 2025
CTM 2025
radialsystem

Yara Mekawei in conversation with Gascia Ouzounian

Join us for a conversation between acclaimed sound artist Yara Mekawei and sound studies scholar Gascia Ouzounian as they explore Mekawei’s new work, »Sonic Forces,« commissioned by the CTM Radio Lab. This project explores the interconnections between personal and political struggles through sound, offering an auditory journey through Egypt’s border regions with Palestine, Libya, and Sudan—sites of conflict, refuge, and resilience. Using field recordings from crossing points, refugee camps, and border towns, Mekawei crafts a layered soundscape that reveals the paradox of seeking safety amid deeper personal struggles. The conversation will also examine Mekawei’s wider artistic practice, touching on key themes such as the politics of listening, her collaborations with architects and interdisciplinary artists, critical approaches to field recording, and how Sufism has shaped her creative vision.

CTM 2025: Encounters with Sonic Forces

Adela Mede, Marta Forsberg, and Nindya Nareswari in conversation with Ján Solčáni

This panel discussion brings together three distinctive artists whose SHAPE+ supported residency at CTM 2025 explores the connections between traditional vocal practice and the aesthetics of contemporary electronic music. Musician Adela Mede, whose work crosses linguistic and socio-cultural boundaries through Slovak, Hungarian, and English voices, joins sound experimentalist Marta Forsberg and light artist Nindya Nareswari. Together, they will share their collective approach to the resynthesis of folklore, challenging its notion as a static form.

Central here are Adela's multilingual sonic narratives that challenge the East-West cultural binary while exploring how the practice of storytelling can be transformed through electronic textures and stage presence. In doing so, we seek to address questions about the place of cultural heritage in an era of rising illiberalism and populist nationalism. Through the lens of their collaborative performance, the artists will explore how technology, light and voice can create environments that honour the traditional while updating it within new territories of expression.

CTM 2025: Folk Forward – Resounding the Roots Through a Contemporary Voice

This lecture discusses the 20th century philosopher and historian of ideas, Pierre Hadot, and focuses on chapter 11 of his book, Philosophy As a Way of Life. 

He discusses the distinction he draws between discourse about philosophy and philosophy itself. He argues, using the example of the Stoics, that the parts of philosophy they distinguish (ethics, logic, and physics) are discourses about philosophy rather than philosophy as such, which is a "unitary act" of living and being.

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Pierre Hadot, Philosophy As A Way Of Life - Philosophy and Discourse About Philosophy

Talk by softchaos
ig: https://www.instagram.com/softchaosssss/
soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/softchaosssss
resident advisor: https://ra.co/dj/softchaos

Also available to watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdHaB2OOQ7k

This presentation, consisting of a lecture and reading, will explore the fundamental question of who is permitted to be experimental? In extension, it is an investigation into the aesthetics of the black radical tradition. Through the prism of radical black thought and culture, the lecture extends the work of Lorraine O’Grady, Tony Cokes, and Hannah Black in asking about modalities of consent, affect, and risk in music making and more generally, who gets to be loud? Who is heard when they are being honest about the world in their music?

Drawing from softchaos’s own study of black trans/black femme music history and theoretical practice of those writing about how sound moves, the lecture will focus on the history of discourse of sound politics and attempt to re-position and reclaim black art as a force of social generative power. For softchaos, improvisation in lecture/performance provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western music making. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, softchaos’s concept of lecture experimentation also brings such figures as Lil’ Kim and Sylvia Wynter, Jeff Mills and Slim Soldedad, Moor Mother, and Immanuel Kant into conversation with each other.

During the lecture, they will read excerpts and present visuals from two of their previous (and ongoing) works. »Where did these plants come from and other ontological stress« (2021), first staged at Matadero Madrid Centro de Creación Contemporánea explores the critical dissonance between black culture’s trans-continental generative power and how it’s valued. »voice works 5: WAKE IT UP WITH SALT« (2024), first shown at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, draws from works by Édouard Glissant and Fred Moten and personal sound archival materials to recreate a spiral telling of the body.

Friday 31 January 2025
CTM 2025
radialsystem

CTM 2025: Freaky Belladonnas: Permission, Risk and Movement in Experimental Music by softchaos

Friday 31 January 2025
CTM 2025
radialsystem

Artist talk and workshop by Dadabots

Musicians are exploring new sounds and creative processes with generative machine learning. In a world of easy fast food AI music apps, trve kvlt music hackers take on the arduous path of building, training, and breaking their own neural nets. If this is you, this talk will start your journey.

Dadabots highlight a decade of their underground experimentation with neural synthesis, from numpy and RNNs to diffusion, alongside 24/7 live streams of infinite death metal, legendary artist collaborations, human vs AI beatbox battles, machines that invent new genres, prompt jockeying as a live music format, open source AI, and more.

@dadabots

CTM 2025: Hack Your Own Music AI

Jay Watts tackles Essays, accountability, and answering questions about biblical justifications for abortion.

#35 Season 4 Episode 3

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

I'm that YouTube Philosophy Guy! Find more than 3,000 videos in my main channel.  Support my video and podcast work!  https://www.patreon.com/sadler or https://www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM

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Berlin’s CTM Festival supports an open, networked, mutually-collaborative, global music culture through its yearly 10-day festival as well as countless collaborative and research initiatives, co-commissions, concerts, and other constantly-evolving formats. The 2 decades old festival stands out for its conscious pairing of daring artistic content and adventurous club experiences with an in-depth discourse programme, framing today’s sounds and music cultures within a shifting, hybrid global society.

New tracks tagged #discourse