Sonic Acts

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...

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 Ber...

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 th...

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...

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...

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. Gust...

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 planet...

@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. 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. MUSIC Speaker Music - with empathy The Other People Place - Let M...

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...

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, paint...

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

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 documenta...

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 u...

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 As...

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 li...

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Rick Dolphijn – (The Earth Demands) The Necropolitics of Art – Introduction by Lucas van der Velden 22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands '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 th...

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

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

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Irit Rogoff – Becoming Research – Introduction by Lucas van der Velden. 22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 'Research' as we experience it now in both institutional and culturally active contexts has moved away from stable bodies of knowledge to be excavated as well as away from recognised subjects whose validity is universally recognised....

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Jodi Dean – Communism or Feudalism? – Introduction by Ash Sarkar 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands In the twentieth century, much of the Left understood society as facing a choice between socialism and barbarism (to use the phrase made famous by Rosa Luxemburg). By the century’s end, some argued that the experiments of state socialism we...

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Sasha Litvintseva, Beny Wagner – Universal Syntax – Introduction by Victoria Douka-Doukopoulou. 22 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands This talk will introduce a long-term collaborative project, Universal Syntax, by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner which seeks to untangle the human tendency to read the natural world as a text. The long and r...

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Gregory Sholette – Can an Anti-Capitalist Avant-Garde Art Survive in a World of Lolcats, Doomsday Preppers and Xenophobic Frog Memes? Do We Have a Choice? – Introduction by Ash Sarkar 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands As artistic activism becomes a signature attribute of contemporary high culture, a wave of museum boycotts, protests, occ...

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Flavia Dzodan – The Coloniality of the Algorithm – Introduction by Juha van 't Zelfde 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands The topic of Flavia Dzodan’s talk is the coloniality of the algorithm or how contemporary technologies became a tool of racial, gender and class exclusions that can be traced back to the foundational moment of modern ca...

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Ramon Amaro – AI as an Act of Thought – Introduction by Juha van 't Zelfde 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Artificial intelligence (AI) research has risen exponentially in the last decade. One of the stated goals of AI is a better understanding of the world around us. As such, an increasingly large proportion of human reality is now li...

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Tony Cokes – the next ‘revolution’? 07.2001 (revised 02.2019) – or progress does not exist – Introduction by Ash Sarkar 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands In his talk, Tony Cokes will revisit some of his ideas he deployed in a talk presented in July 2001. He will begin with Black Celebration (1988), his first work to examine the legacy of...