6:00 – 7:30 — Dinner on your own

• Jacquelene Drinkall — Radical Listening and Improvised Telepathy Aesthetics (after Pauline Oliveros, Sun Ra and Gianni Motti)
  Radical Listening & Telepathy Aesthetics

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  I will discuss and perform fragments from my sound performance work Emergency Alfoil Anthrop and reflect on how sound has manifested in my artistic and art historical/curatorial work with telepathy. Emergency Alfoil Anthrop emerged from group visits to the ‘Witches Leap’ rainforest waterfall, and borrowed Pauline Oliveros’ strategy of listening and improvision to generate telepathy. Documentation of Emergency Alfoil Anthrop was accompanied by video of a brain and spinal column woven from telecommunications wire resembling an animated jellyfish floating and flying about the rainforest - and I look at connective differences with Sun Ra’s work with telepathy, handmade jellyfish props and noise. Performers in my work are covered in alfoil head-to-toe to resemble the Tin Man, an Anthropocene anti-hero dependent on oil who cuts down trees.
  
  Other relevant works that combine telepathic poetics with audio in art include my work with a psychic in contact with Marcel Duchamp. My recent work looks at the role of nitrous oxide in various situations: a greenhouse gas accelerating the Anthropocene; inspiring William James’ experiences with and work on telepathy in ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’; an accelerant in aviation. I found audio generated by the psychic medium Leslie Flynt in dialogue with a deceased pioneer aviator, Amy Johnson, who follows new advancements in aviation and space travel in the afterlife. I combined this mediumistic audio recording with documentation of EEG data mapped onto a virtual UFO. I will further contextualise my work through new research into other artists working with telepathy and audio.
   
• Patrick Kindig — On Occult Amulets and Decadent Aesthetics
  On Occult Amulets and Decadent Aesthetics

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  Stay tuned!
   
• Julian Gill-Peterson — Greer Lankton’s Living Room; or, the Occulting of Trans History
  Greer Lankton’s Living Room

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  In “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” Sandy Stone suggests that “transsexuals for whom gender identity is something different from and perhaps irrelevant to physical genitalia are occulted by those for whom the power of the medical/psychological establishments…is the final authority for what counts as a culturally intelligible body.” This paper takes up that occulting as an unlikely resource for rethinking transgender history, where what has lain hidden in plain sight might offer a richer sense of what transness can mean outside of medicine. American artist Greer Lankton (1958-1996), who left her entire life’s work and a staggeringly enormous personal archive to the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, serves as a case study in a differently powerful, occulted artistic work (she was never that famous) that iconizes transness in the domestic sphere. In “It’s All About ME, Not You,” produced for the Mattress Factory shortly before her death, Lankton painstakingly recreated her Chicago apartment’s living room, featuring a series of shrines, dolls made in her image, and a deluge of pill bottles cataloging her hormone therapy, but also battles with addiction and anorexia. I read this installation alongside the overwhelming volume of her personal papers, which provide a day-by-day account of the last decade of her life, as an invitation to undo the occulting Stone describes through a sacrilegiously spiritual, anti-cathartic, at times demonic, but ultimately domestic-based aesthetic that radically houses transsness in a living room.
   

• Steven Nathaniel — Geophonic Listening and the (Occulted) First World War
• Sandra Huber — Villains, Ghosts, and Roses, or, How to Speak with the Dead
  Villains, Ghosts, and Roses

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  If our species is headed towards an “unparalleled catastrophe” as Sylvia Wynter notes in an interview with Katherine McKittrick, then it is time to rewrite the stories that are leading us there. In this essay, I examine “the dead” as a category that exceeds metaphysical classifications of subject and object and provides alternate possibilities of communication, hybridity, and storytelling. To do so, I call on work by Isabelle Stengers, John Durham Peters, Jacques Derrida, Gertrude Stein, Eve Tuck and C. Ree, among others, with the cultural work and words of Sylvia Wynter as a guide and galvanizing force. Here, I repopulate the life/death seam with gorgons, witches, fates, and revenge stories. If ghosts are seen simply as other beings, albeit taboo ones like bacteria, or require alternate cultural narratives like villains, or exist both in the symbolic sphere of the mystical and the so-called natural world like roses, what kinds of ontologies and methodologies can be opened? How can communication with the dead reformulate the way we recognize categories of human and nonhuman? What do the dead have to say and how do we listen?
  
  

  
  

  
  
   
• Anne Delgado — Death-Defying Acts and the “’Sister Art of Magic’”

• Geraldine Finn — As I was saying...
  As I was saying...

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  In my presentation last year I explored the proposition/question ‘what’s left of the left’ concluding that to the extent that the left is an aspect of the right (in that left and right are two sides of the same coin and the currency belongs to the right) there is nothing left of the left and – at the same time and for the same reason – there is everything left: left in, left out, left over, left behind, left undone, left to the future, left to chance, left in the lurch, left in the cold, left to itself, left holding the baby—left for dead. This excess of what is left is irreducible because no category (of right or left) is adequate to the reality it aims to name, claim, frame, tame and contain. And every effort to do so by adjusting or extending the frame, to be more (or less) inclusive for example, only leaves more residues, remnants, refuse and remains in its wake: left over, left out, left behind etc. This is not an accidental feature of naming and framing that can be progressively eliminated or refined but a constitutive condition and inexorable (truth) effect of it; one that insists, persists, resists, and is played out in the melodrama of our personal lives: in the pleasures and pains, aspirations, and gains of a perfectly familiar jouissance that by definition eludes the concept; and in the ‘murmur of the real’ that feeds our pathologies and passions as well as our arts, and that can be heard in our music if we have ears to hear. This irreducible excess of what is left is I suggest the literally u-topian (no-place) an-archic (no-rule) occulted (secret-ed) source/resource of possibility and change, creativity, imagination, refusal, resistance and remains that no political category can frame, tame or contain. My paper will explicate these claims with particular reference to music.
  
   
  
  Ce qui reste à force de musique: occultation/auscultation: aspects of each other.
  
   
  
  So let’s listen. Yes, let’s listen.
   
• Daniel Lukes — Bad Rainbows: Queerness, Fascism, and Counterculture
  Bad Rainbows

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  The rise of the alt-right as a cultural arm of contemporary revanchist nationalism, combined with critical work – from Anton Shekhovstov’s ground-breaking article “Apoliteic music: Neo-Folk, Martial Industrial and ‘metapolitical fascism’” to the vital antifa activism of whomakesthenazis.com and Stewart Home (among others) – have brought to the surface that which artfully hid in plain view in neofolk music (particularly Death In June): its fascist content.
  
  One of the ways in which DIJ has muddled discussions surrounding the band’s political intent is through performative pinkwashing: rainbows marshaled in the service of fascism and white nationalism, and the proffered assumption of queerness as counterhegemonic. In parallel DIJ assembles a musical performance of “weakness” – strummed acoustic guitars, faded WWII samples and fragments of antique audio memorabilia, to project its central metaphor of the Nazi as self-pitying victim – a literary trope adopted also in Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones (2006), which Laurent Binet refers to as “[Michel] Houellebecq does Nazism.” This posture is entirely compatible with critique-forestalling comic practices of irony and provocation which we may term “fascist clowning.”
  
  Black and brown rainbows, which call attention to the oft-erased presence of POC in LGTBQ spaces, are deployed as antifascist response to neofolk and extreme metal’s white rainbows. We see them shine in Texas duo Pinkish Black, who fashion a keyboard-laden velvet iron glove which queers, refracts, and redirects extreme metal’s splintering hegemonic jaggednesses into soft, interstitial, and wavering forms, in a recalibration of countercultural art as queer critical practice.
   
• G. Doug Barrett — How We Were Never (Post-)Human: Techniques of the Posthuman Body in Pamela Z’s Voci.
  How We Were Never (Post-)Human

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  This paper analyzes artist/musician Pamela Z’s work in light of feminist critiques of posthumanism from sound/music and black studies. Z’s large-scale multimedia work Voci consists of a series of vignettes combining vocal performance with digital video and audio processing. Z manipulates these sources using the BodySynth, an “alternate controller” that converts bodily gestures into expressive control signals. Z’s work, which foregrounds race and gender, has been considered through cyborgian, Afrofuturist, and posthumamanist discourses. Yet rather than fully consonant with the posthuman, I argue that she challenges the liberal humanism upon which posthumanism is built. For a key tenet of humanism, as Alexander G. Weheliye notes, was the raced and gendered apportionment of humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans.
  
  Z uses technologies of the embodied voice to confront both the posthuman imaginary and the continued effects of its ideological preconditions in racio-colonial liberal humanism. In a section of Voci entitled “Voice Studies,” for instance, Z engages the problem of “vocal profiling” as it applies to housing discrimination, citing the work of Stanford linguist John Baugh. Against a backdrop of percussive vocal clicks, Z explains, “Studies reveal that people can often infer the race of an individual based on the sound of their voice,” subsequently playing recordings of housing applicants containing vocal signifiers of racial difference. Following a discussion of Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s sonic color line, I turn to “Divas,” in which Z stages a techno-operatic lament that problematizes the historical roles of gender and sexuality found in the Gesamtkunstwerk.

11:00 – 12:00 — OCCULT-THEMED DRAG SHOW!

Sunday, November 4

location change: Courtyard Marriott, 310 S. College Ave!

9:30 – 11:30 — Panel 8 — RESONANCES, VIBRATIONS, & TIME

• Phil Ford — Here Time Becomes Space: Resonance and Diviner's Time
  Here Time Becomes Space

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  This paper concerns the altered state that esotericists call gnosis: initiatory knowledge, revealed in experience, that changes the knower. One object of occult gnosis is what, after Joshua Ramey, I will call "diviner's time." This is not a unidirectional chain of cause and effect stretching from past to future, but a time that encompasses all of the past, present, and future simultaneously in a crystalline structure where objects and events are linked as nodes in a latticework of connections. As Gurnemanz says in Wagner's Parsifal, here time becomes space.
  
  In the gnosis of divination, things in this spatialized time are connected through the "acausal connecting principle" that Jung called synchronicity. Synchronicities might better be called "resonances," as these are connections of likeness in the manner of rhymes, echoes, or the sympathetic resonance of strings. Bells, which have always formed a part of magical and religious practice, are particularly significant figures of resonance.  
  
  In Parsifal, the moment time becomes space occurs when Parsifal, brought into the mystical Grail castle, hears the sound of bells and glimpses a hidden and higher reality. This resonance resonates: as with Wagner's leitmotifs generally, the resonance between instances of the bell leitmotif (and therefore also between entities in the drama) takes place in diviner's time. If music can model different temporalities and ways of being — the heroized individual acting within the time of decision that analysts have discerned in Beethoven's music, for example — then this paper is concerned with a being at home in diviner's time.
   
• Taylor Adkins and Joseph Weissman — Musiconomy and Morphogenesis: Refrains of Culture, Crystals of Time
  Musiconomy and Morphogenesis

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  Positing that philosophy may be dreamed otherwise, we conduct a non-standard philosophical experiment according to the musical model. Installing a plastic, collective, and abstract motor scheme into writing, we synthesize and investigate several occultural instances, including Adorno's musical intervention in popular astrology, the uncanny loop of Proust’s ‘dream book,’ Simondon’s elaboration of crystalline amplification... Can this material be elaborated according to another (unilateral) syntax? Examining these instances, we offer an unacceptable hypothesis: the sentience of music.
  
  In the time of the refrain, we discover sonocultures—cultivations of sound-worlds, crystallizations of temporal, spiritual and politico-economic lines. We suggest the concept of musiconomy as a vehicle for analyzing the extended criticality of life, thinking, and the city from an experimentally-unified musico-morphogenetic perspective. For musiconomy, time is the object of a design practice. In this sense, art and especially music capture or recover chronogenetic potentialities and thereby produce or dismantle crystals of time.
  
  How do our knowledges of life, cities, and thinking individuate? We offer several musiconomic theses: urbanism, cognition, musicality (1) participate symmetrically in living structures of determination (extended crisis); (2) continuously transform via symmetry changes according to specific principles of individuation; (3) respond to temporizing morphogenetic principles (Longo/Montévil) or chaosmotic abstract machines (rediscovering Guattari with Deleuze). It is in the spironomic melt-up or transdifferentiation of living forms, societies, and ideas that we find or create ways to dream philosophy.
   
• Jonathan Scott Lee — Becoming-Cicada-Becoming-Imperceptible: Toward a Hermetic Account of Music
  Becoming-Cicada-Becoming-Imperceptible

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  In the brief final treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum (ca. 300 C.E.), the author (ostensibly Hermes Trismegistus) argues that musical instruments are themselves “a hindrance to greater beauty” (C.H. XVIII.2), suggesting thereby that the greatest beauties achievable in music might be discovered along the path of becoming-imperceptible. As an example of an ideal performance, Hermes cites that of a cithara player whose broken string was replaced by a cicada (C.H. XVIII.6). In this presentation, I explore the implications of the cithara’s becoming-cicada-becoming-imperceptible in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s account in A Thousand Plateaus of the semiotic of haecceity, itself an example of the radical deterritorialization characteristic of all becoming and, hence, of becoming-imperceptible.
   

11:45 – 1:15 — Panel 9 — TRACES

• Jonathan Elmer — Making a Sensation
  Making a Sensation

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  TBA!
• Émile Fromet de Rosnay —Becoming an antenna: seismopoetics and embodiment
  Becoming an antenna

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  If, for Ezra Pound, artists are “the antennae of the race,” what might tuning into the supersaturated technosphere make us hear, see, and feel? With Jack Spicer’s notion of "transmission," the poet becomes a radio receiving transmissions from outer space. There’s Sun Ra, too. More recently, Kodwo Eshun has beckoned us to listen to different voices and forms of life (including the ones we don’t want to hear) that “operate by disagreements and differentiations,” and aim to intervene in cultural politics so that they might articulate a discontent and ultimately “focus despair and depression into theories that live.” In attuning to sonic ontologies in both hyperstitional and speculative philosophies, I am answering to the call for a new lexicon for apprehending a “supersaturation” of forces that “compos[e] and recompos[e] new forms” (Sharp quoted by Sheldon, 2015).
  
  Being an antenna involves the seismopoetic: the regular and irruptive vibrations of the material world as signals severed from the semantic sphere (Benveniste’s unbridgeable gap between the semiotic and semantic): where philosophical tradition sees a smooth transfer from matter to soul via the seismon, we require a new theory of seismon that doesn’t merely describe (pace Bennett), and of poiesis (making) that, rather than reverting to the semiotic, sees “forms of life” in their singularity. If poiesis seeks to know form, I argue that rhythm needs achronic temporalities answering to singular forms of life, blasting the contradictions between structure and quantum, that think anew the possible relationship between the semiotic and semantic.
    
• Sam Martin — Palaeohauntological Lithophonics
  Palaeohauntological Lithophonics

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  The meeting between speculative realism and hauntology must consider the problem of alien temporalities, the planetary time scales that exceed human time. This was a missed encounter in the work of Mark Fisher (k-punk) on sonic hauntology, the scope of which is still mostly confined to the history of the last several decades. I propose to correct this shortcoming by introducing a palaeohauntological lithophonics, which brings hauntology itself backward to study how non-human time disrupts human time, by lending an ear to the earth itself. Thus, palaeohauntology unavoidably builds on the thought of Bernard Stiegler, who, in the Technics and Time books, identifies the Palaeolithic era with the inauguration of a new regime of memory, the regime of mnemo-technology, or externalized memory storage, (the so-called “de-fault”). Palaeohauntology inverts Stiegler’s model by moving from a view in which mnemo-technology represents a supplementary exteriorization of human faculties, to one in which humans are conditioned by an invasion of alien time. The study of palaeohauntological lithophonics is also itself haunted by two other disciplines which concern themselves with the (dis-)connection between matter and memory, one outmoded, the other cutting-edge. The former is the parapsychology of hauntings, which has a history of hypotheses about the potential of ordinary objects to record and replay events (including sounds) in the form of hauntings, as in the “Stone Tape” theory. The latter is the burgeoning field of archaeoacoustics, which uses acoustic methodologies to examine neglected attributes of sites inhabited by early man, such as cave resonance.
   

 Wrap-Up!