Sonic Acts Podcast

Embassy of the North Sea (Frank Bloem and Harpo 't Hart) – Fieldwork Presentation 19 May 2023 – Ruigoord, Amsterdam During their fieldwork presentation for Maritime Frictions, Frank Bloem and Harpo 't Hart observed the port of Amsterdam from a chemical point of view, following their nose and ears to smell and listen to the stories of life in the harbour. Throughout their presentation, the pair interweaved narratives of extractivism and international trade told by biological and fossilised bulk goods with stories of the marine life living on the hulls of cargo ships. Founded in 2018, The Embassy of the North Sea departs from the idea that the North Sea belongs to and should own itself. It researches how nonhumans, from phytoplankton to ship wrecks to cod fish, can become full-fledged members of our society. The Embassy works towards 2030, when we (humans) hope to emotionally, juridically and politically relate ourselves to the sea in a fundamentally different way. Maritime Frictions was a collaborative event organised by Sonic Acts and FieldARTS' in Ruigoord, west of Amsterdam. The programme included a listening walk with Lance Laoyan, talks by Fred Carter and Charmaine Chua, a performance lecture by Liquid Time (Jacob Bolton and Miriam Matthiessen), a screening of Michaela Büsse's ‘Building with Nature' (2022), a sound performance from Velma Spell, and DJ set by Nessim. Explore the more from the programme at https://sonicacts.com/agenda/maritime-frictions Maritime Frictions is a part of New Perspectives for Action, a project by Re-Imagine Europe co-funded by the European Union. CREDITS Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Roman Ermolaev Video editing: Bin Koh Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

19 May 2023 – Ruigoord, Amsterdam Speculating on logistics as a project of time management, Liquid Time's lecture performance at Maritime Frictions considers processes of distributing, expropriating and configuring planetary time. Based on field research carried out in the IJ estuary to the west of Amsterdam, the duo maps out three sites throughout time that each, in their own way, encapsulated enact a particular temporal dynamic within maritime space: from the harbour that shielded Dutch East India Company ships from storms in the sixteenth century, to the newly opened Sea Lock – the largest moving metal structure in the world – designed to allow mega ships to enter Amsterdam. Along the way, Liquid Time charted the oceanic and anthropogenic rhythms that form each location, the building blocks of what they call the ‘infrarhythm' of logistics. Liquid Time (Jacob Bolton and Miriam Matthiessen) are a research duo working around shipping, finance, and the temporalities of maritime worlds. Miriam Matthiessen is a researcher interested in critical logistics and urban political ecology. Jacob Bolton is an architectural researcher interested in supply chain violence and resource struggle. Drawing together artistic and critical practices, Sonic Acts and FieldARTS' collaborative event Maritime Frictions also included field presentations from Harpo 't Hart and Frank Bloem (Embassy of the North Sea), a listening walk with Lance Laoyan, talks by Fred Carter and Charmaine Chua, a screening of Michaela Büsse's ‘Building with Nature' (2022), a sound performance by Velma Spell, ending with a DJ set by Nessim. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/agenda/maritime-frictions Maritime Frictions is a part of 'New Perspectives for Action', a project by Re-Imagine Europe co-funded by the European Union. CREDITS Video editing: Bin Koh Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

19 May 2023 – Ruigoord, Amsterdam Fred Carter's introductory talk at Maritime Frictions follows hydrological and logistical flows across transitional waters of the IJ estuary and the oil terminals of the Port of Amsterdam. Tracing the emergent turn to fieldwork across practice-based and environmental research, Carter asks: how might we develop practices and tactics in accordance with the IJ's estuarine field? Fred Carter has been a Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre and an associate researcher at Linnaeus University. In 2022, Carter was Saltire Emerging Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, where he is co-director of the residency programme FieldARTS. His debut poetry chapbook, Outages, will be published by Veer2 in 2023. Drawing together artistic and critical practices, Sonic Acts and FieldARTS' collaborative event Maritime Frictions also included field presentations from Harpo 't Hart and Frank Bloem (Embassy of the North Sea), a listening walk with Lance Laoyan, a lecture by Charmaine Chua, a performance lecture by Liquid Time (Jacob Bolton and Miriam Matthiessen), a screening of Michaela Büsse's ‘Building with Nature' (2022), a sound performance from Velma Spell, ending with a DJ set by Nessim for the after party. https://sonicacts.com/agenda/maritime-frictions Maritime Frictions is a part of New Perspectives for Action, a project by Re-Imagine Europe co-funded by the European Union. CREDITS Curation & production: Sonic Acts Video editing: Bin Koh Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

Latent Amongst the Air by Mint Park 27 October 2022 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands In her opening presentation and performance for Night Air: Breathing with Clouds, sound and new media artist Mint Park expands on her fascination with drift, noise and dissipation, discusses the making of her Sonic Acts commission 'Turbulence Studies: Latent Amongst the Air', and considers the dynamic ways we might make our atmospheres visible. Born in Seoul, Mint Park is currently based in Amsterdam. Working at the intersection of music, technology, science and art, her audio-visual practice focuses on the experience of the inter-weaving physical environment and virtual spaces with immersive sound, light, and spatial apparatuses. Besides her own projects, she runs Unheard Records, a label focused on femme, minority, queer and under-represented experimental artists. Night Air: Breathing with Clouds invited us to inhale deeply, sensing the fluctuations and formation processes of the atmosphere around us. The programme featured a presentation and performance by Park, a live film score performance with Sébastien Robert, a cloud tasting with artist Hannah Mevis and a screening of Ho Tzu Nyen's film 'The Cloud of Unknowing'. The evening culminated at high altitude and low pressure, with DJ sets from Emiranda, Rapala700, Bugasmurf and DJ G2G. 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 Breathing with Clouds can be found at: https://sonicacts.com/archive/night-air-breathing-with-clouds CREDITS Curation & production: Sonic Acts Design: Toni Brell https://tonibrell.de Video editing: Roman Ermolaev Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan http://faboem.nl

Maritime Imagination by Mikki Stelder SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 16 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Thinking of the future imaginary of water invites a journey back into its unsettled past. In 1609, Dutch East India Company lawyer and state ideologue Hugo de Groot crafted the notion of ‘mare liberum', or the free sea, turning the ocean into a commodity ready to be exploited. Tracing the colonial undercurrent of our maritime imagination across time, interdisciplinary researcher and writer Mikki Stelder is interested in how the ocean's very materiality actively resists notions of commodification perpetuated by today's legal narratives. Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

The Right to Water by Daphina Misiedjan SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 16 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Following that question of our (Western) attitude towards water, Daphina Misiedjan explores its being as a right. As researcher of environmental justice and human rights, she looks at drinkwater as a fundamental life source and its unequal distribution in the world. What does our abundant use of drinkwater here mean elsewhere in places where there is little, to none? Does access to water mean one has the right to use it? And, what about nature's rights? Who has got the right to water? Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

The Future Waters of the Storm Surge by Aura Satz SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 16 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands From the perspective of the Oosterscheldekering – a protective barrier that connects the Zeeland islands and is designed to protect the Netherlands from flooding from the North Sea – water is a threat, a potential source of disaster, an alarming sound. By exploring such sites visually and sonically, filmmaker Aura Satz is reimagining emergency sirens in an age of intersecting human-made and ecological disasters. Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Watch the ‘The Future Waters of the Storm Surge' trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDWxEJGDW68&t=0s Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 https://iamanagram.com Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

ISLAND by Thomas Lamers (Collectief Walden) SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 16 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Resisting or allowing, the sea floods the land sooner or later. Not more than 250 years from now, the drowning of Amsterdam is going to be a fact, performance collective Walden foretells. Their performative installation EILAND, or Island, speculates how future inhabitants of the capital will deal with that ‘end-time'. Water here becomes an ‘ending force', a moving border pushing back the geographical coastline, but also a potential source of imagination for how one might want to deal with this near future. Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 https://thomaslamers.nl https://collectiefwalden.nl Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

Dirt, Debt, Death, Data by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 16 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Oil, the 20th century's most important non-renewable resource, lies at the centre of discourses on ecological peril and financial oppression, though its colonialist history has faded from view. In a lecture performance enacting a liquidation of Mideast history, speculative exploration, extractive economics, and fictional representation, the artist debuts a one-person collective called Oil Research Group (ORG). ORG is propelled by the concept that ‘data is the new oil', coined in 2006 by British mathematician (and customer loyalty card inventor) Clive Humby. Oil is a finite source at the very core of both global financial markets and #nofuture petroleum wars; information, seemingly infinite, also ‘leaks' into the collapsing tripartite structures of governance, markets, and society. The digital self is sticky, like a bird after an oil spill. Moving along the axis of four Ds: dirt, debt, death, and data, ORG traces the finitude and preciousness of our dominant technologies, along the way testing assumptions about the material and immaterial ways in which we are connected, addicted, fossilised, and one hopes, liberated in their wake. Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

Transient Marshlands, Permanent Progress – Geographies of Uncertainty by Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou & Agnès Villette SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 16 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands On the shores of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands lie three nuclear installations forming an eclectic nuclear geography. Gravelines, Doel and Borssele nuclear power stations started operating in the 1970s on the unstable marsh soils of reclaimed land – that is new land created out of the water. Today, rising sea levels due to global warming threaten the power plants imminently, requiring the construction of dykes and elevated buffers, which are currently being implemented. We explore these swampy geographies as places where the future-oriented temporality of the nuclear sector crumbles. Both nuclear reactors, as the cathedrals of the 20th century, and polders, as the epitome of hydraulic engineering, are archetypal figures of modernity. Both symbolise the conquest of natural environments and consolidate national identities. Yet, despite their ‘solidity', the existence of these three nuclear infrastructures is under threat. As examples, they confirm the importance of countering progress and linear historical narratives of nuclear progress, and help us understand how atomic technologies permeate our lives. Rather than an undefined, deep nuclear future, we are interested in how these nuclearised polders leave the vast temporal scales of nuclear waste behind, offering an opportunity to consider how such technologies are already and urgently affecting the present. Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

Spatial Acts: Geographies of Absence and Waithood by Ola Hassanain SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 16 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Architecture situates ‘building' as an ecological ‘emptying' of territories and an infrastructure for continuous cycles of ‘catastrophe', such as forced migration. One thing that remains in the wake of catastrophe in this day and age is the continuation of building as a marker for the end of catastrophe. This implies that we should all wait while building finishes, that our problems and the imposed difficulties are never urgent enough, thus constituting 'building' as the suspension of time for some, an imposed waiting as the infrastructure for the built environment. This talk shows an essayistic video titled ‘The Line That Follows', which challenges conventional linear perspectives on time – vantage points still used today for the representation of built forms as induction of future realities – by including practices of space-making rooted in other sensibilities. An analogous constellation, composed of manipulated perspective drawings derived from routes taken in Khartoum, abstracted forms, text, sound, and ritualistic practices – all placeholders for propositions of an unemptied space and an aspiration for an architecture that listens. Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

Atlas Otherwise by Nishat Awan SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 16 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands While there have been many attempts to think and make maps differently, the atlas is usually understood as a compendium of maps rather than a form of knowledge production. How can we rethink and remake the atlas otherwise to tell stories that do not follow the logic of colonisation and of property? The recent forensic or evidentiary turn in the arts has been ushered in through the scopic view of satellites and the ubiquity of image material across digital platforms. Such practices of digital witnessing allow us to ‘see' further and deeper into places that are at a distance from us, but at the same time they create the conditions that make certain subjects recede from view. The empty geometric volumes of digital cartography also intensify the absence of materiality and the removal of experience from traditional atlases. How might we rethink notions of testimony and evidence in relation to the digital, knowing also that the witnessing of violence requires forms of empathy and affectivity that are not always readily available within computational forms of knowing? How can we think of the digital not as a tool or a method, but as a realm of possibility that may allow certain lives and worlds to become (il)legible, mourn-able and addressable on their own terms? This presentation is an attempt to rethink the atlas as an archive that is produced through the entanglements of matter, moisture and our own and other's inhabitation. Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 https://nishatawan.me Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

Five Stories on Heat by Kent Chan SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 16 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands ‘Five Stories on Heat' is a storytelling performance by Kent Chan that ruminates upon art's shared histories and futures with heat. The performance blends narratives of artmaking during the Vietnam War, Malayan and Hopi myths, with potential film plotlines and the first exhibition of Singaporean art in Europe. Like a mosaic, Chan's storylines skip from East to West, from the past to the future. His work engages with the concept and representation of ‘the tropics' in relation to colonialism, politics and identity, and highlights that ‘the tropics' are not just solely defined by meteorology and geography, but also by Western narratives about aesthetic and cultural superiority. Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 http://kentchan.info Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

‘Everywhere is a here, isn't it?' On Toxic Entanglements by Antonia Alampi SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 15 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands ‘Human actors strive to interpret, define, or contain the toxic, but how are they also acted upon? Or [...] what happens when the dump is in us? What is the duality of contamination that emerges when we think of toxicity as an ongoing and morphing process?' (Chloe Taft, ‘What is TOXIC?', TOXIC: A Symposium on Exposure, Entanglement, and Endurance, 2016, New Haven) Practitioners from various disciplines have long been engaged in exposing experiences of toxicity. At the heart of many such endeavours is the necessity of finding ways to make visible the complex entanglements of toxicity: of seemingly distant geographies and places; of the different reasons and interests that lie behind the manufacturing of toxicity; of the ways found to bypass national and transnational legislations; of the forms of collaboration between state apparatuses and organised crime in facilitating corporate interests at the expense of people. This talk starts with the toxic events in Alampi's hometown, in a little village in Calabria, and moves on to discuss platforms such as Toxic Commons and the exhibitions ‘Deadly Affairs' at Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp and ‘The Long Term You Cannot Afford' at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin. What may emerge are similarities, more than differences, and proximity, more than distance. Everything being closer, way closer than one may think. Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

Sensing Polluted Airs by Nerea Calvillo SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 15 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Geoengineering projects sustain a state of affairs. But how can we think about infrastructures designed to deal with polluted air in the world we all share? Maybe by testing other modes of paying attention, treating or engaging with it; through infrastructures that acknowledge a broken world, but might trigger other ways of living in it; or with infrastructural experiments to test if collectively sensing pollution, rather than simply seeing information about it, can produce new responses and affects. To sense air physically, as well as emotionally, culturally, poetically… Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

Public Experiments in Chemical Regulation by Angeliki Balayannis SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 15 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Industrial chemicals form the infrastructure of modern life. The regulation of these chemicals – in particular the dominant permission-to-pollute regime – is built on logics that produce environmental and epistemic injustices. In light of this, what kind of interventions might enable different ways of ‘doing' regulation; regulatory experiments that instead foreground justice? Regulation remains dominantly imagined as the work of civil servants and regulatory scientists. This talk invites a cultural and political expansion of the regulatory imaginary. Attending to regulatory geographies beyond the work of regulators opens up new sites for intervening in toxic legacies. Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 https://angelikibalayannis.com Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

Sunlight Doesn't Need a Pipeline by Dani Admiss SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 15 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Dani Admiss looks at how a collaborative climate justice project Sunlight Doesn't Need a Pipeline initiates a collective rethink about what forms of repair are needed in the art sector and beyond. The current solutions of climate repair are flawed; carbon accounting and offsetting practices reiterate a narrative where one party repairs for another and scarcity narratives such as the half-Earth ‘solution' propose a redistribution that imposes violence for many and a feeling of loss for others. In her talk, Admiss talks about commissioned projects by Luiza Prado and Chanelle Adams within the context of the Sunlight project. She also thinks about how repair can be meaningful to people in their own lived experiences and communities, as well as within environments that are shaped by humanity but exist far beyond them. Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 https://daniadmiss.com https://sunlightdoesntneedapipeline.com Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

Performing the Sublime Sea of Co-Mattering by Mary Maggic SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 15 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Through years of research through public ‘workshopologies' on the project Open Source Estrogen, biohacking methodologies have proven to serve far more than spreading didactic knowledge. These protocols, which produce an existential knowing in our bodies and environments, inevitably lead to a form of collective worlding and knowledging – strategies that may help us out of ecological ruins. Combining biohacking with performance in a new dramaturgical workshop, ‘Performing the Sublime Sea of Co-Mattering', participants embody the very agency of toxic molecules and their ongoing process of worldbuilding, emerging on the other side with a radical breakage from the past. Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 https://maggic.ooo Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

when we image the earth, we imagine another by Sophie Dyer & Sash Engelmann (open-weather) SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 15 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands ‘As the weather image grew, Miel's consciousness expanded, bending to the curvature of the Earth. Far from an out-of-body experience, the feeling was one of being profoundly situated: sandwiched between the sun-warmed Land, particle-laden air, cloud, satellite and cosmos.' (S. Dyer, S. Engelmann, ‘When I image the earth, I imagine another', Ecoes #3, Sonic Acts Press, 2022) Last year, on the first day of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, a network of people operating DIY satellite ground stations around the world captured a collective snapshot of the Earth and its weather systems: a ‘nowcast' for an undecided future. Tuning into transmissions from three orbiting National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites, volunteers collected imagery and submitted field notes from their geographical locations. Combined, these contributions generated a feminist and fractal image of the Earth, and a record of conditions of climate crisis from Buenos Aires to Kinshasa to London. As open-weather, we ask: What does it mean to collectively image the Earth, and in doing so, reimagine the planet? Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution's invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces' not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art's potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 https://open-weather.community Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/

Filtered Clouds_do not store in container by Hannah Mevis 27 May 2022 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Although a vast body of water is present in the air at all times, clouds are only perceptible by a careful combination of distance, moisture density, and light. Mist and fog, despite causing low visibility, are a way for earth-bound critters to experience clouds. As they hang low and cling to surfaces, we breathe them in and absorb them through porous bodies. Drawing attention to these intimate encounters, Hannah Mevis' artwork inspired by morning dew, 'Filtered Clouds_do not store in container', encouraged us to taste clouds. Harvested locally, the clouds were meant to be sent travelling through our digestive systems and beyond. Curiosity towards the body and more-than-human lifeforms lies at the heart of Hannah Mevis' artistic practice. Taking multiple, ever-changing shapes, she invites her audiences into participatory encounters such as wearing sculptures, floating a space, joining in on a political action or consuming culinary dishes while engaging with stories of food history. Currently, Hannah is focusing on states of exhaustion, alongside capturing a cumulus cloud. Night Air: Breathing with Clouds invited us to inhale deeply, sensing the fluctuations and formation processes of the atmosphere around us. The programme featured a presentation and performance by Park, a live film score performance with Sébastien Robert, a cloud tasting with artist Hannah Mevis and a screening of Ho Tzu Nyen's film 'The Cloud of Unknowing'. The evening culminated at high altitude and low pressure, with DJ sets from Emiranda, Rapala700, Bugasmurf and DJ G2G. 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 Breathing with Clouds and its participants can be found at https://sonicacts.com/archive/night-air-breathing-with-clouds CREDITS Curation & production: Sonic Acts Design: Toni Brell https://tonibrell.de Video editing: Roman Ermolaev Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan https://faboem.nl

NIGHT AIR: SHIFTING SANDS Félix Blume – Desierto 22 April 2022 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Félix Blume's talk and ‘Desierto' (2021, 24') listening session transported the audience to Altiplano Potosino in central Mexico, a major gold and silver mining hub. Commissioned by ARTE Radio, the piece is filled with recordings from these elevated plains, emphasising that the desert, far from being hostile, is prolific with life. In the audiovisual work and installations of sound artist and engineer Félix Blume, listening emerges as a core tool, a means to encourage the awareness of the imperceptible, and as an act of encounter with others. Blume's artistic practice is often collaborative, working with communities and using public space as a context within which to explore and present work. Intrigued by myths and their contemporary reinterpretations, he hones in on human dialogues with both inhabited natural and urban environments, tuning into what voices can say beyond words. Blume's pieces have been broadcasted by radio stations around the world. A recipient of the Paysage Sonore Prize for the video piece ‘Curupira, Creature of the Wood' (2018), Blume was also presented with the Pierre Schaeffer prize for ‘Los Gritos de México' (2015) at the Phonurgia Nova Awards. He has participated in festivals and exhibitions including LOOP Barcelona, Ex Teresa, Arts Santa Monica, CTM, Thailand Biennale, IFFR, etc. Blume resides between France, Mexico, and Brazil. Digging into the relationship between sand, the history of pollution, and economy, Shifting Sands featured an audiovisual work by Félix Blume, talks from scholars Jeff Diamanti and Michaela Büsse, as well as films from Enar de Dios Rodríguez, Maika Garnica, Ans Mertens and Yanjin Wu. In the latter part of the evening, artist Farzané delivered a performance of ‘LÖSS', before DJs Femi, TAAHLIAH, Snufkin, and Europa took over for the night. More information about Shifting Sands and its participants can be found at sonicacts.com/discover/night-air-shifting-sands 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 editing: Marie Debarbieux https://mariedebarbieux.wixsite.com Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan http://faboem.nl

NIGHT AIR: SHIFTING SANDS Jeff Diamanti – Phosphate Futures: Body, Territory, Mutiny 22 April 2022 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands In his talk ‘Phosphate Futures: Body, Territory, Mutiny', Jeff Diamanti unfolds the figurative force of elemental phosphorus across four fields on Earth: Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Port of Elizabeth, South Africa; Laâyoune, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic; and the moraine of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Jeff Diamanti is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. His book ‘Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum' (2021) tracks the political and media ecology of fossil fuels across the extractive and logistical spaces that connect remote territories. His new research, Bloom Ecologies, is about phytoplankton, phosphorus, and the spectre of hypoxia. He organises a residency called FieldARTS together with Fred Carter. Digging into the relationship between sand, the history of pollution, and economy, Night Air: Shifting Sands featured an audiovisual work by Félix Blume, talks from scholars Jeff Diamanti and Michaela Büsse, as well as films from Enar de Dios Rodríguez, Maika Garnica, Ans Mertens and Yanjin Wu. In the latter part of the evening, artist Farzané delivered a performance of ‘LÖSS', before DJs Femi, TAAHLIAH, Snufkin, and Europa took over for the night. 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 Shifting Sands and its participants can be found at sonicacts.com/discover/night-air-shifting-sands 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 http://faboem.nl

NIGHT AIR: SHIFTING SANDS Michaela Büsse – Granular Grammar 22 April 2022 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Michaela Büsse's lecture and performative reading unearths how sand has become one of the Netherlands' most important resources and focuses on the country's centuries-long history of land reclamation. She will present clips from her new film that question how an industry that started out as protection against flooding has become serious business. Michaela Büsse is a Research Associate at the Institute of Cultural History and Theory, and Associated Investigator at the excellence cluster ‘Matters of Activity. Image Space Material' at Humboldt University in Berlin. She is interested in the interplay of material practices, technologies, and geological processes. Digging into the relationship between sand, the history of pollution, and economy, Night Air: Shifting Sands featured an audiovisual work by Félix Blume, talks from scholars Jeff Diamanti and Michaela Büsse, as well as films from Enar de Dios Rodríguez, Maika Garnica, Ans Mertens and Yanjin Wu. In the latter part of the evening, artist Farzané delivered a performance of ‘LÖSS', before DJs Femi, TAAHLIAH, Snufkin, and Europa took over for the night. More information about Shifting Sands and its participants can be found at https://sonicacts.com/archive/night-air-shifting-sands 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 editing: Marie Debarbieux https://mariedebarbieux.wixsite.com Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan http://faboem.nl

Out of Focus: Down the Crimson Cliffs, past the Fjord of the Dead, over the Signal Mountain by Louis Braddock Clarke & Zuzanna Zgierska 31 March 2022 – Ot301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands In a talk about their audiovisual project, ‘Out of Focus', Louis Braddock Clarke and Zuzanna Zgierska track down the widely dispersed fragments of a meteorite that fell thousands of years ago in Imnaminomen, Greenland. Previously hidden under the ice cap, the deposits have become an open invitation for explorative extraction. Their talk stems from field work in the region and brings forth stories that intersect geological events, mineral extraction and postcolonialism. On Thursday 31 March 2022, Sonic Acts continued the event series Night Air with Melting Cores at OT301 in Amsterdam. This gathering got to the heart of matter – a place of reaction and fusion, where insights are generated and imaginations proliferate. Featuring talks, films, performances and DJ sets, Melting Cores explored the politics of climate archiving, elemental collapse, and the (de)centralisation of cultural perspectives. 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 faboem.nl

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

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

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

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.

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. More information about Exhaust and its participants can be found at https://bit.ly/3CasgWK. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 Underground Division: Helen Pritchard + Jara Rocha – Rock Damages 22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam The Netherlands The *Underground Division* is an action-research collective of different people based in London, Brussels and Barcelona. They are interested in technologies around subsurface rendering – a trans*feminist undercurrent exists in all of their projects intelligently engaging with the environment. Their lecture at Sonic Acts on this intuitive and cutting-edge practice gives insight into their ROCK REPO project, which starts from the damage around rocks to reconsider their agency. The *Underground Division* – here represented by Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha – will perform a lecture based on their project ROCK REPO. It is a device built by a team of trans*feminist post-normal scientists for thinking with rock. It is an inquiry into what rock is, what it could be, and the ways in which rock is seen or considered as an entity separate from its environment. As not easily fixed entities, rocks provoke a reconsideration of categories: inert or not, discrete or not, timely or not. A set of ​‘queering damage’ operations will be activated to attend to certain harms of technosciences in relation to volumetrics, geocomputation and the praxis of feeling backwards. The *Underground Division* is an action-research collective that investigates technologies of subsurface rendering and its imaginations/​fantasies/​promises. It is dug by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting with the help of many other others. As a follow-up on the collaborative research Possible Bodies looking into co-construction of so-called bodies and 3D paradigms, the-body-of-the-earth is now attended to as the framework for a study on similar sensibilities but different spacetimes. The *Underground Division* bugs contemporary regimes of volumetrics that are applied to extractivist, computationalist and geologic damages. Their research will eventually culminate in the Trans*Feminist Rendering Program, a hands-on situation for device making, tool problematising and ​‘holing in gauge’. London-based artist and researcher Helen Pritchard​’s work brings together the fields of computational aesthetics, more-than-human geographies and queer trans*feminist technoscience. Her practice considers the impacts of computation/​computational art on the figuration of environments and environmental justice for the development of inventive methodologies that propose otherwises. She is co-editor of Data Browser 06: Executing Practices (2018) and a special issue of Science, Technology and Human Values on Sensors and Sensing Practices (2019). Pritchard is the Head of Digital Arts Computing and a Lecturer in Computational Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Together with Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha, she activates the creative research group the *Underground Division*. Jara Rocha is a researcher based in Barcelona who works through the situated and complex forms of distribution of the technological with a trans*feminist sensibility. With a curious confidence in transtextual logistics and a clear tendency to profanate modes, she tends to be found in tasks of remediation, action-research and in(ter)dependent writing. Main areas of study have to do with the semiotic materialities of cultural urgencies. Together with Femke Snelting and Helen Pritchard, she is currently active in the *Underground Division*.

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 Daniel Mann – Healing and Killing in the Underground 22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands London-based filmmaker and writer Daniel Mann explores how image production shapes perceptions of armed conflict, colonisation and climate emergency. His films have screened internationally, including Motza el hayam (Low Tide) (2017) which premiered at the Berlinale’s Forum, and Salarium which was presented at the Sonic Acts Academy in 2018. Daniel Mann’s talk, titled Healing and Killing in the Underground, features a screening of an episode from Eitan Efrat’s and Mann’s film The Magic Mountain (2020). Thinking the surface of the Earth against its volume is tracing the very limits of representation. Underneath the ground, human bodies become surfaces upon which the land leaves its mark, imprinted directly into the cells and tissue. While the landscapes outside are captured and mediated in the form of postcards, paintings, snapshots and films that appeal to the naked eye, a rare energy leaks through the crevices in the stone below, before it is inhaled into the lungs, absorbed and consumed through the skin. Underground the body is the postcard of the subsoil. Daniel Mann is a London-based filmmaker and writer. Mann explores the role of image production and circulation in shaping collective perceptions of armed conflict, colonisation and climate emergency. His 2017 film Salarium, co-directed with Sasha Litvintseva, was presented at the Sonic Acts Academy in 2018. His writing has appeared in journals such as Media, Culture & Society and World Records and his films have screened internationally at festivals including Berlinale (Forum). Mann holds a PhD from Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. As a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Film Studies Department, King’s College London, he is developing a new project on the role of Middle Eastern desert environments in cinematic depictions of war, conflict and future annihilation.

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 Marjolijn Dijkman + Toril Johannessen – On 'Reclaiming Vision' 22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam The Netherlands Note: Marjolijn Dijkman joined Toril Johannessen for the Q&A that followed the lecture On 'Reclaiming Vision' Bacteria, algae and other microbes are essential for the very being of life on earth. Marjolijn Dijkman and Toril Johannessen warn us that every second breath we take is produced by algae in the oceans. Those ideas are beautifully visualised in their film Reclaiming Vision, which is a topic of their lecture at the Academy conference. A starting point of this talk is a film that was captured through a microscope. Its diverse cast of microorganisms was sampled from the brackish waters of the inner Oslo Fjord, alongside algae, cultivated at the University of Oslo. Starting from the assertion that looking evolved from the sea – eyes, in fact, evolved from marine algae – Reclaiming Vision takes the viewer on a journey through various ways of looking at, relating to and influencing nature. Toril Johannessen is an artist living in Tromsø in Norway. Perception and representation as historical and technological constructs are recurring themes in Johannessen’s artistic practice. Combining historical records with fiction and her own investigations, and with an attention to how science coexists with other systems of knowledge and belief, her works often have elements of storytelling in visual or written form. Most recent solo shows include Entrée and Trykkeriet, Bergen (2019); OSL Contemporary (2019), Munchmuseet on the Move, The Munch Museum, Oslo (2018) and Hordaland Art Centre, Bergen (2017). Brussels-based artist Marjolijn Dijkman​’s practice addresses the human desire for knowledge, combining speculation with science in works that seem sci-fi in form. In reflecting on how institutionalised systems are relied on to assert the politics of assumed knowledge, her work proposes alternate knowledge systems. Her projects involve history museums, scientific enquiry and forms of collective imagination, manifesting in photographic archives and films, installations and sculpture. Futurology, museology, anthropology, cosmology and ecology are all areas the artist investigates. Dijkman has had solo shows most recently at NOME Gallery, Berlin, Munchmuseet, Oslo and fig‑2 at the ICA Studio. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions such as Contour Biennale 9, Mechelen, the 21st Biennale of Sydney and the 11th Shanghai Biennale.

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 Anja Kanngieser – Listening to Ecocide 22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands For political geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser, sound is the sense mechanism that drives their work – from a documentary interlacing stories on resisting deep sea mining in Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu to an audio walk on rising sea levels. As an academic, their work creatively amplifies social justice claims around politics and climate change. Anja Kanngieser’s talk, aptly named Listening to Ecocide, addresses through sound the complexities faced by frontline Pacific communities. The Pacific Island of Nauru at the heart of the Pacific Ocean is the frontline of environmental crisis. Strip-mined by colonisers of its natural phosphate reserves, the backbone of industrial agriculture, the island nation has relied on Australia’s brutal offshore refugee incarceration régime for the last decade. With severe eco-systemic vulnerabilities – contaminated water, diminishing land, droughts and sea inundation – Nauru exemplifies the precarious position induced by extractive colonialism and racial capitalism. Bringing together site-specific audio recordings with Indigenous Nauruan voices campaigning for self-determination and self-representation, Kanngieser shows sound and listening as vital to understanding, and amplifying, the deep relations to land and sea that Nauruan’s hold and the complexities they face. Anja Kanngieser is a political geographer and sound artist based in Wollongong, Australia, who creatively investigates space and politics. In their work Anja begins with the premise of sound as a constant, a phenomenon that is always present – whether heard, felt, or sensed by human or non-human species and technologies. Their most current projects use testimony, field recording and data sonification to document and amplify social justice responses to the effects of climate change in the Pacific. In their first book, Experimental Politics and the Making of Worlds (2013), they open up communication between urban groups to find common sites for protest around precarious living and working conditions, migration and higher education. Research interests include labour practices in China, sound technologies for mapping movement and micro radio in Japanese urban politics. In their most recent project, Climates of Listening, community-oriented social justice responses to climate change in the Pacific are amplified. A Vice Chancellors Fellow at the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research at the University of Wollongong, Australia, their writing is widely published and they are an editorial board member of journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 Nabil Ahmed – Ecocide Forensics 22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands As founder of the project INTERPRT, artist, writer, researcher and musician Nabil Ahmed makes a clarion call for international criminal law to protect against ecological impunity. The environmental justice project that has worked with Princeton and renowned art institutions leans on spatial design to consider ecological visual culture, investigating at-risk regions like bio-diverse and conflict-ridden West Papua/​Indonesia, endowed with the planet’s largest reserve of copper and gold. International criminal justice offers considerably limited protection to the environment and to the livelihoods and dignity of peoples. In West Papua, where the Papuans are fighting the longest self-determination struggle in the Pacific, the Indonesian state and minerals, natural gas and palm oil corporations are getting away with ecocide and crimes against humanity. Yet today, civil society groups, NGOs and journalists have expanded access to geospatial information, audiovisual media and open-source data to expose state violence and corporate crimes. Forensic truths acquired by non-state actors are increasingly admitted in legal contexts and for advocacy purposes. This lecture explores how spatial analysis and environmental forensics are put to work by INTERPRT to not only document underreported environmental offenses and human rights violations, but also in an effort to recognise ecocide as an international crime. First invoked during the Vietnam War, ecocide has the potential to be an effective tool for climate frontline governments and civil society in the fight against ecological impunity at the international criminal court and beyond. Nabil Ahmed holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is affiliated with Forensic Architecture. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the Academy of Fine Art in the architecture and design faculty at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is also founder of INTERPRT, which investigates environmental crimes using spatial analysis and advocates for the criminalisation of ecocide under international law. The group collaborates with international lawyers, research centres and civil society such as Princeton Science & Global Security and Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People, and has exhibited projects at venues including Biennale Warszawa/​Modern Art Museum in Warsaw and the Beirut Art Centre. INTERPRT is commissioned by TBA21 – Academy. Ahmed has written for Third Text, Candide: Journal for Architectural Knowledge and Architectural Review among others and is published in numerous books.

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 Terike Haapoja – Vulnerability, Community, Animality – The Art of Being Here with Others 22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands New York-based artist Terike Haapoja represented Finland at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). Her projects and collaborations, including those in collaboration with Laura Gustafsson, challenge human-centric perspectives. Gustafsson&Haapoja enacted a trial in which eight-year prison sentences were given for killing wolves and opened a museum for cattle. In 2019, their 16-speaker sound installation of pigs awaiting slaughter brought the animal factory to Zone2Source in Amsterdam. Terike Haapoja’s lecture Vulnerability, Community, Animality – The Art of Being Here with Others, takes 2020 as a landscape of deepening polarisation in the political sphere as well as between people and Earth’s other inhabitants. At the core of these divides is a question of the ​‘we’ of political community, traditionally defined as ​‘we the people’. On one side of the void looms white nationalism, closing borders and rising fascism. On the other, rights of nature and decolonial demands to dismantle the state apparatus. This void hides legal divides between things and persons, and ontological divides between subjects and objects: gendered and racialised mechanisms of making killable and making sovereign. How these divides have been constructed and how we could rethink them is at the core of Haapoja’s interdisciplinary work. Starting from her collaborative art projects, Haapoja approaches questions of animalisation, law, interspecies communality, vulnerability and ethics in relationship to art and its role in political change. Terike Haapoja is a visual artist based in New York. Haapoja’s large-scale installation work, publications, writings and political projects investigate the mechanics of othering with a specific focus on issues arising from the anthropocentric worldview of Eurocentric traditions. Haapoja represented Finland in the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) with a solo show in the Nordic pavilion, and her work has been awarded with several prizes, including ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art (2016), Dukaatti prize (2008) and an Ars Fennica Prize nomination and for her work with writer Laura Gustafsson as Gustafsson&Haapoja. Haapoja is an adjunct professor at Parsons Fine Arts and New York University.

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 T. J. Demos – Beyond the End of the World 22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Celebrated writer T. J. Demos rarely leaves a seat empty at his talks on politics, ecology and art, often attending to decoloniality within nature. His most recent book addresses the occlusions embedded in the academic use of the term ​‘Anthropocene’ (human-caused planetary change) in shielding problems as opposed to opening inroads for change made accessible by artists. This presentation discusses the ongoing research and exhibition project, Beyond the End of the World, directed by T. J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies at University of California, Santa Cruz (beyond​.ucsc​.edu). In the wake of the end of multiple worlds, we already live in a post-apocalyptic present following countless genocides and colonialisms. With reference to diverse traditions of the oppressed, this year-long research project addresses what lies beyond dystopian catastrophism, past and present end-of-world narratives, and how we can imagine and cultivate radical futures of social justice and ecological flourishing. T. J. Demos is an award-winning writer and Professor of Visual Culture at University of California, Santa Cruz and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely about contemporary art, global politics and ecology and is the author, most recently, of Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017) and Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016). Demos co-curated Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas, at Nottingham Contemporary in 2015 and organised Specters: A Ciné-Politics of Haunting, at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2014. He is currently working on a Mellon-funded research, exhibition and book project dedicated to the questions: ​‘What comes after the end of the world?’ and ​‘How can we cultivate futures of social justice within capitalist ruins?’ #politicsandart #ecologyandart #anthropocene #future #experimental art

@speakermusic speaks to @arifonline about the origins of techno, un/available historical nostalgia and a HECHA hat he is wearing that says: Make Techno Black Again. Music in this podcast is listed below. This is the third episode of the Sonic Acts x Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee podcast series on the occasion of Sonic Acts Academy 2020, taking place in Amsterdam 21 - 23 February. Read more about DeForrest Brown Jr. below. 2020.sonicacts.com Music: Speaker Music - with empathy The Other People Place - Let Me Be Me Speaker Music - without excess Young Paint & Actress - Travel Paint Zadie Smith on NPR DJ Stingray - Cognitive Load Theory Dopplereffekt - Technic 1200 Félicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - And the Flower have Time For Me Speaker Music - Exercises in Black Quantum Drumming Heatsick - Déviation Félicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Her Eyelids Say Fhloston Paradigm - ...all feat. Moor Mother Ashtar Lavanda - Opulence DeForrest Brown Jr. is a New York-based rhythmanalyst and media theorist. Brown’s praxis Speaker Music is inspired by Rhythmanalysis, a book of essays by urbanist philosopher Henri Lefebvre as well as considerations of momentum and the ‘chronopolitical’ from cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun. Mobilising free improvised electronic percussion and stereophonic audio recordings, Speaker Music yearns to caress, engineer and sculpt sentiment into a multi-textural rhythmic body, quivering the nexus event of the moment into a collapsed ‘nonpulsed time’ towards a shared sphere of intimacy. Mix, Production: Arif

Lukáš Likavčan and Leonardo Dellanoce speak about extinction, spectres and the game Death Stranding. They discuss how the future influences the present and how computer modelling fails to predict the Australian forest fires. This is the second episode of the Sonic Acts x Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee podcast series on the occasion of Sonic Acts Academy 2020, taking place in Amsterdam 21 - 23 February. Read more about the speakers below. 2020.sonicacts.com Theorist Lukáš Likavčan, who will speak at Sonic Acts Academy, 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.’ Concluding his PhD in environmental studies at Masaryk University, Brno, he now teaches at Center for Audiovisual Studies at FAMU in Prague and Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow. 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. Leonardo Dellanoce, invited by Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee to host this conversation, is an art historian who explores technological realities using art and design as navigational tools. Collaboration is at the core of his practice, as he works with artists, spatial designers and theorists on a variety of projects. Among others, he is co-leading the cross-disciplinary research project Vertical Atlas: a Techno-political Cartography, and co-curating Digital Earth, a 6 month research fellowship for artists and designers in Africa and Asia. Currently, he is also editor of Volume magazine where he initiated the long-term research project Trust in the Blockchain Society.

Sadaf speaks to Ivan Cheng in this first episode of the Sonic Acts x Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee podcast series on the occasion of Sonic Acts Academy 2020, taking place in Amsterdam 21 - 23 February. Read more about both artists below. 2020.sonicacts.com Sadaf H Nava (Sadaf) is an Iranian-born, New York City-based composer and visual artist whose multidisciplinary interventions include sound, film, painting, performance and text. Sadaf’s layered and cinematic visuals, sonics and confrontational performative tactics oscillate between opacity and narrative. Her work upends the inward-looking affect inherent to contemporary performance, subverting the languages of auto-fiction and the artist/ muse. These original compositions comprise intuitive and clashing material inspired by contemporary global archaeologies of sound, always flirting with noise. Ivan Cheng, who is a regular on Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, also edited this episode. He focuses within his practice on misunderstanding, abrasion and desire in the act of reading, often gesturing towards systems of power and reproduction. He also works as a performer, clarinettist, curator and writer. He holds an MFA in Critical Studies (Sandberg Instituut), having previously studied at the Royal Academy of Music and Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Text-based performances have been presented in Sydney, Melbourne, London, Amsterdam, Vilnius, Tokyo, Berlin, New York, Krakow, Lyon, Saint-Etienne, Bonn & Köln. He initiates project space bologna.cc in Amsterdam. Photo by John Spyrou

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 FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Post-Screening Discussion: Maeve Brennan in conversation with Mirna Belina 22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Following the screening of Listening in the Dark (44 min, 2018), Maeve Brennan discusses the film with Mirna Belina and takes questions from the audience. Maeve Brennan’s film Listening in the Dark (44 min, 2018) takes a documentary approach, gathering a series of subtle yet penetrating soundings of human beings’ impact on the natural environment. Undisturbed, and largely unchanged for millions of years, bats’ nocturnal rhythms are being increasingly interrupted by the presence of wind turbines. While noting how such well-intentioned technological developments are affecting the atmosphere in ways we do not always appreciate, Brennan also illuminates how scientific research has revealed a whole sensory dimension that we were previously oblivious to. The film circles around the figure of Donald Griffin, pioneering zoologist and early advocate of animal consciousness, whose researches into bat navigation helped shape our understanding of the concept of echolocation. Following his example, Brennan reminds us, too, of other natural marvels – from the mysteries of animal evolution or the deep historical time of geology – that reveal not only our humbling insignificance in the bigger scheme of things, but also the disproportionate damage we are capable of doing to the planet. Director: Maeve Brennan; Director of photography: Jamie Quantrill; Editor: Mariko Montpetit; Producer: Laura Shacham Listening in the Dark was commissioned for the Jerwood/​FVU Awards 2018: Unintended Consequences, a collaboration between Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Film and Video Umbrella. Maeve Brennan is a London-based artist and filmmaker. Her recent solo exhibitions include Listening in the Dark at Jerwood Space, London, and Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; The Drift at Chisenhale Gallery, London, and Spike Island, Bristol (all 2017); and Jerusalem Pink, OUTPOST, Norwich (2016). She was educated at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was a fellow of the Home Workspace Programme at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut (2013 – 14). She received the Jerwood/​FVU Award 2018 and her film The Drift was screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam.

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Post-Screening Discussion: Tony Cokes in conversation with Mirna Belina. 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Following the screening of Black Celebration (1988, 17 min) Tony Cokes discusses the film with Mirna Belina and takes questions from the audience. In Black Celebration (1988, 17 min), Tony Cokes merges newsreel footage of riots in urban black neighbourhoods in the 1960s with popular music and text commentary to create an incisive counter-reading. ​‘This videotape involves the riots that took place in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California in August, 1965 and the Black neighbourhoods of other American cities during the 1960s. The black and white work uses newsreel footage from events in Watts, Boston, Newark, and Detroit interspersed with text commentary. The newsreel voiceovers are replaced by music. The intent of the piece is to introduce a reading that will contradict received ideas which characterise these riots as criminal or irrational.’ (T.C.) Black Celebration was made for the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Text: Morrissey, Martin L. Gore, Barbara Kruger, The Situationists International; Music: Skinny Puppy; Editor: Eleanor Goldsmith. 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.

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Post-Screening Discussion: Ephraim Asili in conversation with Mirna Belina. 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Following the screening of American Hunger (2013, 19 min) and Fluid Frontiers (2017, 23 min) Ephraim Asili discusses the films with Mirna Belina and takes questions from the audience. In seven years, from 2011 to 2017, Ephraim Asili has completed a remarkable cycle of films called The Diaspora Suite about his relationship with the greater African diaspora. These films – Forged Ways, American Hunger, Many Thousands Gone, Kindah and Fluid Frontiers – document not only his travels across Brazil, Canada, Ethiopia, Ghana, Jamaica and the United States, but also a personal meditation on the constructs surrounding African-American cultural identity. With his observational 16mm cinematography and evocative use of sound and music, Asili is both critical and speculative, listening intently to the resonances of words and gestures that span centuries and oceans. Oscillating between a street festival in Philadelphia, the slave forts and capital city of Ghana and the New Jersey shore, American Hunger (2013, 19 min) explores the relationship between personal experience and collective histories. American fantasies confront African realities. African realities confront American fantasies. Fluid Frontiers (2017, 23 min) is the final film in the Diaspora Suite. Shot along the Detroit River, it explores the relationship between concepts of resistance and liberation, exemplified by the Underground Railroad, Broadside Press and artworks of local Detroit artists. All of the poems are read from original copies of Broadside Press publications by natives of the Detroit Windsor region, and were shot without rehearsal. 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.

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Post-Screening Discussion: Louis Henderson 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Following the screening of Bring breath to the death of rocks (2018, 34 min)(work in progress) Louis Henderson discusses the films with Mirna Belina. ‘I feel this force that draws me towards the invisible doorway, and it is like a fire burning in my stiffened limbs. So I must walk through the fields of snow… there, to where my resting place is already prepared.’ (Édouard Glissant, Monsieur Toussaint, 1961) Wandering from a study of the handwritten memoirs of Toussaint Louverture in the French National Archives to the prison cell in the Jura mountains in which they were written, Bring breath to the death of rocks (2018, 34 min) proposes an archaeology of the colonial history of France buried within its landscapes and institutions. Many millions of years ago the Jura was a tropical ocean, as it metamorphosed into the mountain range it is today it left behind large sedimented layers of time, creating the strata that fold along the horizon line. If stratigraphy is the writing of strata, here we have a reading of this strata in which the fossilised history of Louverture can be brought to life through a geologic haunting. The film dramatises the escape of Louverture’s ghost from his castle prison (through the body of a young Haitian researcher) into a form of marronage and errantry within the fields of snow and a dark baroque-like cave. Through historical détournement the past is revisited in order to imagine an alternative future, and in doing so the film offers what Glissant described in the introduction to his play Monsieur Toussaint as ​‘a prophetic vision of the past’. We hear an echo, a spiral retelling. Featuring extracts of text from Monsieur Toussaint by Édouard Glissant (1959) and Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) by Aimé Césaire. Actor: Jephthé Carmil, DOP: Diana Vidrascu, Editor: Louis Henderson, Producer: Olivier Marboeuf, Spectre Productions. Work in progress. 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.

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 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 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.