Sonic Acts

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Jodi Dean – Communism or Feudalism? – Introduction by Ash Sarkar

23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

In the twentieth century, much of the Left understood society as facing a choice between socialism and barbarism (to use the phrase made famous by Rosa Luxemburg). By the century’s end, some argued that the experiments of state socialism were themselves barbaric. Others pointed out that the reality that unfolded after 1989 proved the truth of the choice: the end of socialism had led to unbearable barbarisms of extreme inequality, militarism and environmental degradation. This presentation by Jodi Dean suggests that the twenty-first century forces us to confront a new choice: communism or feudalism. It presents two speculative futures and suggests the paths leading to each.

Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She has held the position of Erasmus Professor of the Humanities at University of Rotterdam. Her many books include Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (2009), The Communist Horizon (2010), Crowds and Party (2016). Her book, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging, is forthcoming this year from Verso.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Gregory Sholette – Can an Anti-Capitalist Avant-Garde Art Survive in a World of Lolcats, Doomsday Preppers and Xenophobic Frog Memes? Do We Have a Choice? – Introduction by Ash Sarkar

23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

As artistic activism becomes a signature attribute of contemporary high culture, a wave of museum boycotts, protests, occupations and labour unrest marks our current decade. Meanwhile, much of the post-2008, post-Occupy art generation abhors the multi-billion-euro capitalist art market, even as the very term art is radically shifting, twisting, inverting, if not undergoing an outright self-expulsion from itself as it moves from its familiar white cube dwelling places to occupy the public sphere at an ever-accelerating tempo. But as art joins the everyday social world, its status as a privileged and critical realm that is set apart from the ubiquitous materialistic pursuits of a consumer society is likewise receding from view, and in truth, most high cultural practitioners have yet to really face this new, ‘bare’ art world and what it represents. Nevertheless, as art sheds its centuries-old ideological privilege of autonomy, it is gaining a front-row seat in the contentious struggle to rethink society, as well as the expressive, imaginative and artistic value is generated, for whom, why and to what ends. Still, the question lingers, how will art, especially activist and anti-capitalist art, remain critically radical once fully submerged in a world of lolcats, doomsday preppers and xenophobic frog memes?

Gregory Sholette is an artist, activist and writer. He was a founding member of several collectives such as Political Art Documentation and Distribution, REPOhistory and Gulf Labor. In his artistic work and seven books – including Art as Social Action (with Chloë Bass, 2018), Delirium and Resistance (2017), Dark Matter (2011), It’s The Political Economy, Stupid (with Oliver Ressler, 2012) – Sholette reflects upon decades of activist art that, for its ephemerality, politics and market resistance, might otherwise remain invisible. Sholette holds a PhD in History and Memory Studies from the University of Amsterdam (2017). He teaches Studio Art and co-directs the Social Practice Queens MFA program at Queens College, CUNY. He is an associate of the Art, Design and the Public Domain program of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Flavia Dzodan – The Coloniality of the Algorithm – Introduction by Juha van 't Zelfde

23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The topic of Flavia Dzodan’s talk is the coloniality of the algorithm or how contemporary technologies became a tool of racial, gender and class exclusions that can be traced back to the foundational moment of modern capitalism in the eighteenth century. The databases that feed algorithms of both corporations and the surveillance state operate through the logic of resource extractives to classify us as voters, consumers, friends, foes, love interests, sex partners, suspects, criminals or potential perpetrators. Each of the steps that leads to these classifications has been informed by centuries old ideologies converging to assign us a role, a place in the database. These taxonomies, or systems of classification, have been in use since colonial times and cannot be detached from a history of racial, gender, sexual or class hierarchies.

Flavia Dzodan is an Amsterdam-based writer, media analyst and cultural critic. She is a lecturer and research fellow at the Critical Studies Department at Sandberg Institute. Her research is focused on the politics of Artificial Intelligence and algorithms at the intersections of (neo)colonialism, race and gender. She is the editor of the blog This Political Woman, where she has written about the rise of the alt-right, Big Data, networks, algorithms and community surveillance. She has been published at Dissent Magazine, The Guardian and The Washington Post, among others.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Tony Cokes – the next ‘revolution’? 07.2001 (revised 02.2019) – or progress does not exist – Introduction by Ash Sarkar

23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

In his talk, Tony Cokes will revisit some of his ideas he deployed in a talk presented in July 2001. He will begin with Black Celebration (1988), his first work to examine the legacy of the late 60s and early 70s. That video appropriated newsreel images of urban uprisings in Watts, Boston, Detroit and Newark. Cokes juxtaposed the footage with an ‘industrial’ music soundtrack by Skinny Puppy and visual text quotations, prominently from Situationist International’s The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy. The video re-presents these historical events from a distant, but desiring perspective that would counter Reagan-era amnesia or dismissal. Cokes’ presentation will discuss this period in relation to a trajectory within his artistic practice that questions the mythic idea of progress. He will connect three threads: his scepticism with regard to historical constructions, the media’s attempted conversion of ‘revolution’ into a debased marketing trope, and the question of how these representations resonate in our current climate of fear and proto-fascist nationalisms.

Tony Cokes makes video, installation, print, sound and other works that reframe appropriated texts to reflect upon capitalism, subjectivity, knowledge and pleasure. Cokes deploys sound as a crucial, intertextual element, complicating minimal visuals. He has shown works internationally at venues including Centre Georges Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, ZKM, REDCAT and La Cinémathèque Française. Cokes has screened at festivals including the Berlin Biennale X, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rencontres Internationales Paris/​Berlin/​Madrid and Oberhausen. Cokes is Professor in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, Providence, RI. His work is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Ramon Amaro – AI as an Act of Thought – Introduction by Juha van 't Zelfde

23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Artificial intelligence (AI) research has risen exponentially in the last decade. One of the stated goals of AI is a better understanding of the world around us. As such, an increasingly large proportion of human reality is now lived through algorithms. While our relationship with AI is undoubtedly important as a mode of knowledge production, it has far-reaching implications. Most significant is the disparity between the act of existing/existence – particularly as it relates to differential human states of being (race, gender, sexuality, etc.) – and predominant paradigms of epistemological operation. In this talk, Ramon Amaro discusses the domain of AI as an arrangement of axiomatic simplicity that, in its present form, diminishes the variant domains of psychological and physical reality. He argues for a return to the problematics of perception, as illustrated in debates between figuration and Black abstract art, to challenge the notion of an a priori analytics. Ultimately, he proposes a reorientation of the algorithmic as an ontological imperative that establishes the genesis of the human differential as an act of thought in itself.

Ramon Amaro is Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as in the Centre for Research Architecture where he teaches the MA special subject Conflicts & Negotiations and the BA courses Fact of Blackness and Space and Time. Previously, he was a Research Fellow in Digital Culture at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and a visiting tutor in Media Theory at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague. Ramon completed his PhD in Philosophy at Goldsmiths, while holding a master’s degree in Sociological Research from the University of Essex and a BSe in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has worked as Assistant Editor for the SAGE open access journal Big Data & Society, quality design engineer for General Motors and programmes manager for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). His research interests include machine learning, design and engineering, black ontology and philosophies of being.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Ephraim Asili – Mindfulness Cinema – Introduction by Juha van 't Zelfde

23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Artist and filmmaker Ephraim Asili presents a talk about his cinematic practice to date as well as some ideas that he hopes to resolve in future projects. Themes of his presentation include: jazz methodologies, meditation, African-American literary traditions, Sigmund Freud, Sun Ra and concepts of landscape/locational cinema.

Ephraim Asili is a filmmaker, DJ and traveler whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His films have been screened at festivals and venues all over the world, including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA PS1, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Whitney Museum. As a DJ, Asili can be heard live at his monthly dance party Botanica. He currently resides in Hudson, NY, and is a professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER – Introduction by Emily Pethick

The Otolith Group and Annie Fletcher – Eastman is the Matter at Hand24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

From the late 1960s until his death in 1990 at the age of 49, Julius Eastman, the queer African-American avant-garde composer, pianist, vocalist and conductor, wrote and performed compositions whose ecstatic militant minimalism initiated a black radical aesthetic that revolutionised the East Coast’s new music scene of the 1970s and 1980s. No recordings of Eastman’s compositions were released during his lifetime. In January 1980, Julius Eastman was invited by the Music Department at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois to present his compositions Crazy Nigger (1978), Evil Nigger (1979) and Gay Guerrilla (1979).

A number of African-American students and one faculty member objected to the titles of Eastman’s compositions. The titles were redacted from the concert programme. Before the concert on 16 January 1980, Eastman delivered a public statement that responded to these objections. The speeches delivered by two speakers in The Otolith Group’s video, The Third Part of the Third Measure (2017) – on display as the installation at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam during the festival – are based on each performer’s adapted transcription of Eastman’s Northwestern statement. This talk by The Otolith Group – Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun – who will be joined by Annie Fletcher, will focus on the importance of this Afrofuturist artist and expand on ideas in making the film.

In May 2019, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, will present the first large scale solo exhibition of The Otolith Group. The exhibition is curated by Annie Fletcher.

Founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, The Otolith Group makes films, installations, and performances that are driven by extensive research into the histories of science fiction and the legacies of transnationalism. Their works and curatorial projects explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human and the anti-human. In 2010 The Otolith Group were nominated for the Turner Prize.

Annie Fletcher is the chief curator at the Van Abbemuseum. Her projects include the solo exhibition of Qiu Zhijie, the ten-day project in collaboration with DAI called Becoming More in 2017, a collaborative research project led by Vivian Ziherl called Frontier Imaginaries: Trade Markings in 2018 and a large-scale and travelling museum retrospective of the Otolith Group in 2019. She tutors at De Appel, Amsterdam, Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem and Design Academy Eindhoven. She is part of a team that developed the Museum of Arte Útil with Tania Bruguera in 2013 and continues to develop the Association of Arte Útil today. Other projects include solo exhibitions or presentations with Ahmet Ögut, Hito Steyerl, Sheela Gowda, David Maljković, Jo Baer, Jutta Koether, Deimantas Narkevičius, Minerva Cuevas and long-term projects Be(com)ing Dutch (2006 – 09) and Cork Caucus (2005), both with Charles Esche.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa – Carrying Yours and Standing Between You – Introduction by Emily Pethick

24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

During her talk, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa will be reflecting on the similarities and differences between the contexts and research processes that led her to produce the 2015 video Promised Lands and Carrying Yours and Standing Between You, a research/installation recently created for the exhibition Women on Aeroplanes at the Showroom Gallery in London. The opportunity to view these works so close together (Promised Lands was shown at both the Berlin Biennale and the London Film Festival last year) and to observe responses to them has given rise to a new set of questions for the artist about her artistic/research practice that have implications for how she wants her work to develop and what her ‘position’ is (or might be).

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, born in Glasgow, studied Literature at Cambridge University and Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Formerly a participant in the LUX Associate Artist Programme and a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, she is currently a doctoral candidate in Fine Art at the University of Bergen, Norway and Convener of the Africa Cluster of the Another Roadmap School. Recent or upcoming exhibitions include: Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead (Bergen Assembly 2019, Bergen), Women on Aeroplanes (The Showroom Gallery, GB & Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw) and We Don’t Need Another Hero (10th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art).

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Elizabeth A. Povinelli – After the End, Stubborn Affects and Collective Practices – Introduction by Mirna Belina

24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

As many in the West look forward to a climate-induced end of times, huge areas of the human and nonhuman world have been struggling to exist in the toxic excrement of late liberal capitalism. For them, the end of the world has already happened – and it has happened multiple times: the catastrophe of colonialism and imperialism, neoliberalism and extractive capitalism, toxicity and disrepair. This talk asks what affective and collective practices look like if viewed from within worlds that have long existed after the end, using the Karrabing Film Collective as a special case.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York, Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective. She is the author of five books, including the most recent, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016), winner of the Lionel Trilling Book Award. Karrabing films and installations have shown at the Tate Modern, Berlinale Forum Expanded, Melbourne International Film Festival, Contour Biennale, Sydney Biennale, Van Abbemuseum, Institute for Modern Art in Brisbane, Vargas Museum and other venues. Povinelli lives and works in New York City and Darwin, Australia.

The visit of Elizabeth Povinelli was made possible by Het Nieuwe Instituut with support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER

Louis Henderson – Dialect of hurricanes. Patois of rains. Language of storms. Unfolding of life in a spiral. – Introduction by Mirna Belina

24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Unfurling like a fiddlehead fern fond in a forest, the word ‘creole’ comes from the Greek root *ḱer- meaning to grow, to nourish. Celebrating the vast possibilities of translating both into and from Haitian Creole, this talk will describe how the artist group The Living and the Dead Ensemble unravelled into being by translating the play Monsieur Toussaint by Édouard Glissant, from French to Haitian Creole.

The group put Glissant’s work into motion as a means to critique and test the limits of his philosophy within a contemporary Haitian context. The Haitian poet Frankétienne offers a way out through the spiralling voice of the We.

Louis Henderson is a filmmaker who is trying to find new ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Interested in exploring the sonic space of images, his work aims to develop an archaeological method in cinema, listening to the echoes and spirals of the stratigraphic. Since 2017, Henderson has been working within the artist group The Living and the Dead Ensemble. Based between Haiti and France, they focus on theatre, song, slam, poetry and cinema. Henderson has shown his work at various film festivals, exhibitions and biennials worldwide. His work is in the public collection of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, France, and is distributed by LUX and Video Data Bank.

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