Sonic Acts

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 syste...

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. Y...

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 thes...

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...

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,...

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 h...

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 Fran...

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...

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, t...

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...