Sonic Acts

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...

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Ephraim Asili – Mindfulness Cinema – Introduction by Juha van 't Zelfde 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Artist and filmmaker Ephraim Asili presents a talk about his cinematic practice to date as well as some ideas that he hopes to resolve in future projects. Themes of his presentation include: jazz methodologies, meditation, African-Am...

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER – Introduction by Emily Pethick The Otolith Group and Annie Fletcher – Eastman is the Matter at Hand24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands From the late 1960s until his death in 1990 at the age of 49, Julius Eastman, the queer African-American avant-garde composer, pianist, vocalist and conductor, wrote and performed compositions whose ecstat...

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa – Carrying Yours and Standing Between You – Introduction by Emily Pethick 24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands During her talk, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa will be reflecting on the similarities and differences between the contexts and research processes that led her to produce the 2015 video Promised Lands and Carrying Your...

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Elizabeth A. Povinelli – After the End, Stubborn Affects and Collective Practices – Introduction by Mirna Belina 24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands As many in the West look forward to a climate-induced end of times, huge areas of the human and nonhuman world have been struggling to exist in the toxic excrement of late liberal capitalism....

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Louis Henderson – Dialect of hurricanes. Patois of rains. Language of storms. Unfolding of life in a spiral. – Introduction by Mirna Belina 24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Unfurling like a fiddlehead fern fond in a forest, the word ‘creole’ comes from the Greek root *ḱer- meaning to grow, to nourish. Celebrating the vast possibilities...

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Stoffel Debuysere – Fictions of the Real – Introduction by Mirna Belina 24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands With an introduction by Mirna Belina. What has happened to the cinematic fictions that set out to make sense of our times? That is to say: what has happened to fiction as the construction of both an arrangement of events and a relati...

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Filipa César, Jin Mustafa – Meteorisations: Reading Amílcar Cabral's Agro-Poetics of Liberation – Introduction by Mirna Belina 24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands A reading of Amílcar Cabral’s agronomic writings exposes substrata of a syntax for liberation later performed in guerrilla language and the struggle against Portuguese colonialis...