Sonic Acts

NIGHT AIR: SHOCK WAVES

Elena Cohen – Sonic Weapons and Policing: A New York City Case Study

5 November 2021 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Sonic weapons like the Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), ‘roof knocking’, or ‘music torture’ are frequently used as part of the arsenal of state violence. During Night Air: Shock Waves, Elena Cohen presented a series of case studies demonstrating how these tools are deployed in protest, detention, and warfare, causing a range of harm from disorientation and psychological distress to permanent internal damage. Elena L. Cohen is an attorney and professor. She is a founding partner of Cohen Green PLLC (‘Femme Law’), a small firm serving the needs of the New York City queer and activist communities. She teaches law classes to undergraduate students within the City University of New York system, and joined the faculty of Kline School of Law in 2022. She has litigated many high-profile cases, and is currently counsel for Sow v. City of New York, which challenges police practices related to the policing of Summer 2020 protests for Black Lives. She was lead counsel of Edrei v. City of N.Y. – a suit challenging the New York Police Department’s use of Long-Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD), which resulted in substantial policy reform. Her publications focus on sexuality, sound, and comparative constitutions. Shock Waves is an evening event that considered the materiality of sound as a powerful means of resistance and control. The programme included talks by María Edurne Zuazu, Elena Cohen, and Yann Leguay, films by Aura Satz, an installation by Paula Montecinos and Pedro Matias, along with a performance by White Rose, and DJ set by Noise Diva.

More information about Shock Waves and its participants can be found at https://sonicacts.com/archive/night-air-shock-waves

NIGHT AIR

Night Air is a series of Sonic Acts events that aim to make pollution visible by bringing forth the various side-effects of modernity: from exploitation of people and resources to perpetual inequalities brought about by the destruction of the environment and common land – in other words, capitalist practices that shape both our environment and human-nonhuman relations.

CREDITS

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Design: Toni Brell https://tonibrell.de

Video: Marie Debarbieux https://mariedebarbieux.wixsite.com

Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan http://faboem.nl

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

NIGHT AIR: SHOCK WAVES

Technical Involution by Yann Leguay

5 November 2021 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

In his lecture ‘Technical Involution’, artist Yann Leguay speaks to the dematerialisation of sound and the evolving effects of interfaces. He follows with a performance of ‘Volta’, based on an electrical arc produced by a plasma speaker so powerful that it emanates magnetic disturbance. Yann Leguay’s work focuses on the notions of dematerialisation, the use of interfaces and the materiality of sound. He has been called a ‘media saboteur’ by the Consumer Waste label, seeking to fold the sound materiality in on itself using basic means in the form of objects, videos, and performances. Since 2007, he has also been producing installations, sculptures, and publications that integrate a critical approach to the meaning of technological evolution. In concerts he pushes the boundaries of accepted norms of audio behaviour, using uncommon machinery for the playback of audio media: opened hard-drives as turntables, an angle grinder as a microphone, the sound of the electricity, etc. His records are equally unusual: readable silkscreen record, a 7” single without a central hole, or a record composed from recordings of vinyl being scratched by scalpel. In an evening of talks, performances and films, Shock Waves considered the materiality of sound as a powerful means of resistance and control. The programme included talks by María Edurne Zuazu, Elena Cohen, and Yann Leguay, films by Aura Satz, an installation by Paula Montecinos and Pedro Matias, along with a performance by White Rose, and DJ set by Noise Diva.

NIGHT AIR

Night Air is a series of Sonic Acts events that aim to make pollution visible by bringing forth the various side-effects of modernity: from exploitation of people and resources to perpetual inequalities brought about by the destruction of the environment and common land – in other words, capitalist practices that shape both our environment and human-nonhuman relations.

More information about Shock Waves and its participants can be found at https://sonicacts.com/archive/night-air-shock-waves

CREDITS

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Design: Toni Brell https://tonibrell.de

Video editing: Marie Debarbieux https://mariedebarbieux.wixsite.com

Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan faboem.nl

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

NIGHT AIR: SHOCK WAVES

María Edurne Zuazu – Between Shouting and Shooting

5 November 2021 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

In her talk ‘Between Shouting and Shooting’, María Edurne Zuazu introduces sonic weapons like the Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), ‘roof knocking’, or ‘music torture', which rely on high-intensity and focused sound to suppress individuals by impairing their auditory systems. María Edurne Zuazu works in music, sound, and media studies, researching the intersections of material culture and sonic practices in relation to questions of cultural memory, social and environmental justice, and the production of knowledge (and of ignorance) in the West during the 20th and 21st centuries. Zuazu has presented on topics ranging from sound and multimedia art and obsolete musical instruments, to military aircraft sound and popular music, and published on the topics of telenovelas, weaponised uses of sound, music and historical memory, audio surveillance, and music videos. She received her PhD in Music from The CUNY Graduate Center, and has been the recipient of Fulbright and Fundación La Caixa fellowships, as well as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Shock Waves is an evening event that considered the materiality of sound as a powerful means of resistance and control. The programme included talks by María Edurne Zuazu, Elena Cohen, and Yann Leguay, films by Aura Satz, an installation by Paula Montecinos and Pedro Matias, along with a performance by White Rose, and DJ set by Noise Diva.

More information about Shock Waves and its participants can be found at https://sonicacts.com/archive/night-air-shock-waves

NIGHT AIR

Night Air is a series of Sonic Acts events that aim to make pollution visible by bringing forth the various side-effects of modernity: from exploitation of people and resources to perpetual inequalities brought about by the destruction of the environment and common land – in other words, capitalist practices that shape both our environment and human-nonhuman relations.

CREDITS

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Design: Toni Brell https://tonibrell.de

Video: Marie Debarbieux https://mariedebarbieux.wixsite.com

Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan http://faboem.nl

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

NIGHT AIR: SOIL SAMPLES

24 April 2021 - Online Transmission

Soil Samples gathers four artists and researchers for performances, presentations and discussions addressing the topic of soil and its geopolitical, colonial, and bodily entanglements. The panel is made up of sound artist Felicity Mangan, researcher and 'tiny miner' Martin Howse, biogeochemist and critical ecologist Kunal Palawat working in tandem with visual artist Dorsey Kaufmann. The event was transmitted online from Rotterdam on Saturday 24 April 2021, with participants and the audience joining from various locations worldwide.

FELICITY MANGAN

Felicity Mangan is an Australian sound artist and composer based in Berlin since 2008. In different situations, from solo performances and installations to collaborative projects with other artists, Felicity plays with the timbre of animal voices and field recordings to create minimal quasi-bioacoustic environments. Recently, the artist has been exploring the fundamentals of soil life and interspecies creativity, delving into soil’s soundscape, equipped with sensors and imagination.

MARTIN HOWSE

Martin Howse is occupied with an investigation of the links between the earth, software and the human psyche through the construction of experimental situations, material artworks and texts. From 1998 to 2005 Howse was director of ap, a software performance group working with electronic waste, pioneering an early approach to digital glitch. For the last ten years, he has initiated numerous open-laboratory style projects and performed, published, lectured and exhibited worldwide.

KUNAL PALAWAT

Kunal Palawat is a terrestrial biogeochemist and critical ecologist currently working at the intersections of pollution, community-based research, data science, and environmental justice at the University of Arizona on occupied Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui lands (so-called Tucson) in the Ramírez-Andreotta Lab. They are also a Lab Manager and Research Associate with the Critical Ecology Lab, a non-profit research and education container striving to explicitly connect systems of oppression/liberation to global change.

DORSEY KAUFMANN

Dorsey Kaufmann actively challenges disciplinary boundaries by making work at the intersection of art, environmental science, and politics. She primarily works in time-based media; including video, performance, animation, and 3-D installations. Her practice examines the conflict among corporations, governments, and community health. Her work visualises how these tensions and perceptions constantly define and redefine our built environment.

NIGHT AIR

Night Air is a series of online transmissions from Sonic Acts that aims to make pollution visible by bringing forth the various side-effects of modernity: from colonial exploitation of people and resources to perpetual inequalities brought about by the destruction of the environment and common land – in other words, destructive capitalist practices that shape both our environment and human-nonhuman relations.

More information about Soil Samples and its participants can be found at https://bit.ly/3H6YTbH.

CREDITS

Production: Sonic Acts

Host: Margarita Osipian

Visual design: Deborah Mora

Sound design: Igor Dubreucq

Additional help: Mark den Hoed, Karl Klomp, Karl Moubarak and Jorg Schellekens, as well as Hackers and Designers and The Hmm.

Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Sonic Acts is supported by Creative Industries Fund NL, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK) and Paradiso.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

EXHAUST – A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ON OIL AND DATA

27 February 2021 - Online Transmission Curated by Sonic Acts

OVEREXPOSED artistic research resident, writer and theorist Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Exhaust features political and environmental anthropologist Omolade Adunbi, media artist and programmer Ryan Kuo, artist and geographer Helen Pritchard and interdisciplinary researcher Andrea Sempértegui, as well as moderation by critic, curator and art historian Murtaza Vali. The event was transmitted online from Rotterdam on Saturday 27 February 2021, with participants and the audience joining from various locations worldwide. Propelled by the phrase ‘data is the new oil’, coined in 2006 by British mathematician (and customer loyalty card inventor) Clive Humby, Exhaust draws on the insights of eminent academic thinkers and influential practitioners to speculate, critique and make visible the cultural geography of oil and data.

CREDITS

Production: Sonic Acts & Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

Host: Margarita Osipian

Additional help: Danne Hekman, Mark den Hoed, Karl Klomp, Karl Moubarak, Roc Jiménez de Cisneros, as well as Hackers & Designers and The Hmm.

Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Sonic Acts is supported by Creative Industries Fund NL, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK) and Paradiso.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020

Nadim Samman – As We Used to Float / Iroojrilik

23 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Curator Nadim Samman gives a performative lecture that takes to the psychology and aesthetic of the sea, drawing on his explorer’s path through art as co-founder of the Antarctic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and 1st Antarctic Biennale in 2017. His work has carried him from Moscow to Marrakech to Lima, uncovering the secrets of remote art and the mutual exchange that evolves from that act. Straddling the genres of travelogue and critical essay, As We Used to Float: Within Bikini Atoll (2018, co-written with artist Julian Charrière), explores Bikini Atoll as a space of fantasy and trauma. Toggling between a personal account of a sea journey, above and below water, and a critical investigation of postcolonial geography, the book develops broader reflections on place and subjectivity. These spring from a series of narrative immersions, variously, taking on the psychological and aesthetic parameters of ultra-deep scuba diving, the abject poetics of sea craft and the stakes of subaquatic image-making. As We Used to Float is a sea-story for our time. This performative lecture combines reading from the book with a screening of Julian Charrière’s video work, Iroojrilik (2018).

Nadim Samman is a curator and art historian based in Berlin. He read Philosophy at University College London before receiving his PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art. He co-founded the 1st Antarctic Biennale in 2017 and the Antarctic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015. In 2016 he curated the 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, and in 2012, the 4th Marrakech Biennale (with Carson Chan). Other major projects include Treasure of Lima: A Buried Exhibition (a unique site-specific exhibition on the remote Pacific island of Isla del Coco) and Rare Earth (at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna). In 2019 he won the International Awards for Art Criticism’s first prize.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020

Dehlia Hannah – Cloud Walking: Meditations on 'A Year Without a Winter'

23 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Lauded curator and professor Dehlia Hannah delivers a lecture stemming from her environment-focussed publications and research projects. The meeting point of climate change and art – from the volcanic eruption that led to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Paolo Soleri’s utopian architecture in experimental town Arcosanti – is an estuary that for Hannah yields imaginary places, creatures and technologies. In her talk Cloud Walking: Meditations on ​‘A Year Without a Winter’, Hannah enters into the discussion of how, as the world warms and seasonal patterns betray historical records, we are called to rethink key concepts of environments that we inhabit both physically and imaginatively. From regional weather systems to the lived abstraction of a global climate, rising mean temperature, shifting shorelines, disturbed migratory routes and phenological clocks, to new avenues of economic exploitation and militarisation, the boundaries of our environs are open to radical contestation. Published two hundred years after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or: The Modern Prometheus – which was written amidst a global climate cooling crisis remembered as the ​‘year without a summer’ – Hannah’s book A Year Without a Winter (2018) and associated exhibitions explore the literary and visual aftermaths of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, in parallel with emerging narratives of environmental crisis. In this talk Hannah moves through a series of clouds generated by historical events, literature and visual art – volcanic eruptions, poems, climate models, smoke bombs and burning jungles – in search of a new way of conceptualising climate that is responsive to contemporary atmospheric conditions.

Dehlia Hannah is a philosopher of science and curator. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University, with specialisations in philosophy of science, aesthetics and philosophy of nature. Presently, she is Mads Øvlisen Postdoctoral Fellow in Art and Natural Sciences at Aalborg University-Copenhagen and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Her forthcoming monograph Performative Experiments examines contemporary artworks that take the form of scientific experiments. Her book, A Year Without a Winter (2018), reframes contemporary imaginaries of climate crisis by revisiting the literary and environmental aftermath of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora. Among her recent exhibitions are Emerge: Frankenstein (2017), Control | Experiment (2016) and Placing the Golden Spike: Landscapes of the Anthropocene (2015). Her current research examines the role of imaginary places, creatures and technologies in the history of philosophy.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020

Lukáš Likavčan – Introduction to Comparative Planetology

23 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Errata: The lecturer would like to correct the crediting for Holly Herndon's 'Extreme Love’ track from her PROTO album and add co-authors Jenna Sutela and Lilly Anna Haynes. Theorist Lukáš Likavčan collaborates on art projects, including the simulation alt’ai, questioning machine protocols in communicating with environments. Exploring imaginations of Earth from the impersonal, totalising view to one in which humans are environmental accidents at home anywhere, he finds resonance in a line from Holly Herndon’s Extreme Love (2019): ​‘We are completely outside ourselves, and the world is completely inside us.’ In his lecture Introduction to Comparative Planetology, Likavčan looks into how as a philosophical genre, comparative planetology presents an intertwined analysis of visual cultures of imagining the Earth and geopolitics of climate emergency. It compares different ​‘figures’ of the planet – the Planetary, the Globe, the Terrestrial, Earth-without-us and Spectral Earth. These five figures function simultaneously as visual paradigms, geopolitical regimes and design briefs; each of them has different prospects in guiding our interventions against runaway global heating, and ultimately against mass species extinction. While engaging in this conceptual, cosmological endeavour, comparative planetology seeks to become one of the navigational tools in plotting our way out of the impasse of modernity.

Lukáš Likavčan is a researcher and theorist who writes on the philosophy of technology and political ecology. Concluding his PhD in environmental studies at Masaryk University, Brno, he now teaches at Centre for Audiovisual Studies at FAMU in Prague and Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, a graduate of their experimental New Normal programme. As a researcher, he was based at Vienna University of Economics and Business, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and BAK – basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. Oscillating between academic practice and a broad zone between art and design, he focuses on infrastructural conditions of subjectivity, abstraction and imagination. Likavčan just released a book Introduction to Comparative Planetology (2019, Strelka Press) that presents an analysis of visual cultures of imagining the Earth and the geopolitics of climate emergency.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020

DESIGN EARTH: Rania Ghosn – Geostories

23 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Architects Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy co-founded DESIGN EARTH to engage with geography in addressing humanity’s relationship to the Earth through architecture. From Monaco to Mexico City, their research develops projects around concepts such as hypothetical volcanos, the ​‘Pacific Cemetery’ where satellites go to die and a methane aviary as waste disposal unit rendering gas pipes a forest for birds. Rania Ghosn (DESIGN EARTH) begins her lecture Geostories with the question: How might the geographic imagination convert into an image and narrative of the climate crisis? That is, not only as a calamity of the physical environment, but also as a predicament of the cultural one – of the systems of representation through which society relates to complex and unknown environmental futures. In Geostories, geographic fiction becomes a medium to synthesise different forms and scales of knowledge on technological externalities, such as oil extraction, deep-sea mining, space debris and a host of other social-ecological issues, and to speculate on ways of living with such legacy technologies on the planet.

The collaborative practice DESIGN EARTH based in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Cambridge, Massachusetts and is led by architects Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy. DESIGN EARTH literally means ​‘earth-writing’, deploying geographic aesthetics as a form of environmental speculation in the age of climate change. The practice received a Young Architects prize from the Architectural League of New York and DESIGN EARTH have been commissioned by the Venice Architecture Biennale, Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism and Oslo Architecture Triennale. Projects have been exhibited in international art spaces such as SFMOMA and Times Museum, Guangzhou and acquired by the New York Museum of Modern Art. Ghosn is an Assistant Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture + Planning and Jazairy is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at University of Michigan. They co-authored Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (2018), ​‘a manifesto for the environmental imagination’, and Geographies of Trash (2015).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.