(All sessions take place at 155 Walnut Avenue, Toronto)
Please register in advance at https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/tuning-speculation-v-tickets-38782051159
Friday (17 November 2017)
8:45 – Doors open
9:30 – 11:00 — Keynote 1
Johnny Golding — "Friendship"Friendship“He says indifferently and alike – how are you, friend?” (Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass)
Friendship names the raw, sensuous, delicate, multi-dimensional, secret intelligence shared by sentient beings at the moment of their extended encounter. It requires nothing of identity politics, selfhood, social agency, though its very expression enables and indeed solidifies, all this and more. Unlike companionship, it generates a strangely emboldened shared knowing, a suspended aliveness of (and to) otherness without recourse to an old-fashioned ‘mastery’ or ‘authority’ or binaric split between ‘self and Other’. This is not a suspended aliveness as in ‘freefall’ or some kind of nihilistic relativism that generates an always-already ‘in between’ or ‘transitioning’ state of affairs. Leastwise it is ‘romantic’, though its irruptions have launched over a thousand delicious plateaus. Friendship requires a wholly different logic of senses, emotions, libidinal economies, calculations and intentions, closer to the Socratic parrhsia (truth) and its reinvention by Foucault in his Courage of Truth, as epimeleia (the technologies of care). Drawing on a specific encounter, a wild encounter, one stretched over a seven-year period with a semi-feral mustang whose precise split-down-the-middle brown/white face, earned him the Ojibwe name “Manhattan” (corrupted from “Madweijwan, the ‘heard-flowing’ of where the two rivers meet), these remarks here today will step into that suspended aliveness of (and to) otherness in order to develop a wholly different logic of this event-secret-sensuous intelligence called ‘friendship’.
At its core is an ability to harness a particular type of raw energy, sexual presence, even joy – an athleticism, respect, trust, odd form of mastery and slowness of time (despite or, even perhaps, at a gallop), that not only goes beyond the traditional (and anthropomorphically bound) tropes of ‘fraternity’ or ‘brotherhood’, but beyond the linguistic turn itself, with all the trappings of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, the ‘becoming-x’ and the ‘transcendental’, now thrown to one side. In so doing, a form of consciousness and indeed a ‘new’ form of communication is enabled, one that speaks a wholly different language game, embodied in the breat(d)th and fractal singularities that today go under the such headings as quantum entanglements, ana-materialisms, incompletenesses and undecidabilities.
All this I learned from befriending a wildly playful and somewhat dangerous horse named Manhattan.
11:15 – 12:45 — Panel 1
- Louis Bury — "Marina Zurkow's Eco-Om"Marina Zurkow's Eco-OmMarina Zurkow’s 2014-16 conceptual project, Dear Climate, contains visual, written, and sonic components. Created in collaboration with artists and academics Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl,
Oliver Kellhammer, and Sarah Rothberg, the work consists of six podcasts and nearly seventy posters about climate change. The goal of the work is to help audiences reflect on their “inner climate” in the era of the Anthropocene; in the artists’ view, too much of the discourse around climate change focuses on crisis and catastrophe. Consequently, the tone of Dear Climate’s component parts are intentionally playful, weird, and soothing, sometimes all at once. For
example, a representative poster reads, “Climate Change?/ Will it Make Me Look Fat?”
Taking its cues from Zurkow’s playfully serious tone, my presentation at Tuning Speculation takes the form of a series of brief letters addressed to the climate. Focusing on Dear Climate’s podcasts, which sound like scripts for guided meditation, my letters pursue a theory of the vibratory yogic mantra, Om. Each podcast begins and ends with a sonorous chime that, much like a yogic Om, sonically demarcates a period of altered or heightened attentiveness. In yoga, the practitioner’s movements and breathing are the mechanism through which consciousness gets altered; in the podcasts, it is the conjunction of defamiliarized sound and language. Through such attentions, I argue that, like a paradox-besotted yoga instructor, Zurkow suggests that individuals can best effect positive ecological change by accepting their inability to do so. - Josh Trichilo — "Tremulous Exchanges: The Centre for Remembering 3.11’s Traumatic Soundscapes and Resonance Theory"Tremulous ExchangesThe questions of how to disseminate and archive artistic responses to 3.11’s aftermath rightly drew considerable academic attention in the disaster’s following months and years, with scholars like Christine Marran in “Double Vision: Visibility and Legibility in Photography of 3-11” arguing for more attention payed to depictions of life under the fear of radiation. Yet, why visual modes of representation garnered hegemonic attention remains largely unconsidered, which exposes a discursive progeny that constitutes the way the disaster is thought at the expense of the aural and its potential affordances. Calling attention to that silence/ing in order to disquiet the privileged logics of representation on which the largely photographic archiving relies, this paper’s object is instead an unprecedented digital archive of soundscapes recorded during the year after 3.11. Organized by The Centre for Remembering 3.11 and called (somewhat unfortunately, somewhat provocatively) “Gazing with the Ears,” this paper argues that the digital aural archive of affected places engages with Pettman’s “resonance theory” of an ecology of human and nonhuman voices. It argues that the soundscape recordings attune their listeners to environments of acousmatic voices of “subjectively inflected objects”-- humans, birds, engines, rubble, wind, houses, shorelines-- that are heard pinging trepidatiously in a suddenly noisy and radically altered vibrational field. Rather than “revealing the invisible in nature” that threatens an ideal human everydayness, the recordings engage with networks of tremulous exchange, with traumatized vibrational actants attempting to renegotiate a livable frequency in a space whose conditions are suddenly unfamiliar.
- Nikki Cesare-Schotzko — "Out of line, off the grid, and staying in place: a prepositional approach to living-with and dying-well in the Chthulucene"Out of line, off the grid, and staying in place
The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. […] Living-with and dying-with each other potentially in the Chthulucene can be a fierce reply to the dictates of both Anthropos and Capital.
—Donna Haraway, Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene (2016:1, 2)rapturous silence, shouting, composed in listening so we discompose ourselves in one another. Lose your
composure in repose […]
—Fred Moten, You are a base community (2015:11)
We looked at a house the other day. It was a century-old farmhouse in Grafton, Ontario, with 86 acres and two ponds, a natural well, and neighbours with cattle and signs offering fresh eggs. I imagine building a barn for horses and ponies; growing a garden that sustains my hungry boys; raising chickens and maybe a goat. The house
bordered on an $800k asking price; the property was bordered by an electric fence with small signs placed periodically along it: “WARNING / ATTENTION / High pressure natural gas pipeline / Gazoduc de Gas Naturel d’Haute Pression / In case of emergency
call,” etc. etc. etc, bold-font text under the green-and- blue earth-friendly TransCanada logo. They are, after all, “in business to deliver.” I am losing my composure in rural repose.
The average cost, in March 2017, of a detached home in the GTA was $1.5 million, up 29.8 percent from 2016 (CBC 2017). This rabid escalation is determined not by market values but by speculative demand. Yet my desire to cash in on my westside Toronto property and find that commuter oasis that affords me the hipster chic of rural righteousness at a price I can (just barely) afford is a speculative desire itself, made (just barely) possible by that demand. It vibrates the neoliberal fantasy that there is a space outside anthropo(s)cenic capital and throws up discordant harmonies between my eco-feminist politic and my mama-survivalist instinct just to bail. For Donna Haraway, to “stay with the trouble” in the Chthulucene is to acknowledge the present catastrophe without recourse to a culpable past or an apocryphal future; to “become-with each other or not at all”. This requires “tentacular thinking”. It also requires either a place to stay or to become(-with), because I’m speculating here that those two places of inequivalent stasis are not the same. What happens when the din of the capitalist-industrial machine underscores the speculative, sounding out desire now as spectacular and the tentacular as overwhelmingly dire?
12:45 – 2:00 — Lunch (provided)
2:00 – 3:30 — Panel 2
- Sparkles Stanford — "Vibrational Predation: Neo-Reactionary Nostalgia and the Tender Flesh of Sound-Body Hybridity"Vibrational PredationKodwo Eshun warns us that the sampler is as predatory as it is respectful, a predation audible from Musique Concrète and Plunderphonics up to contemporary Vaporwave and neoreactionary nostalgia art. Rather than being a deviation, this right-wing art is a crystallization of the conservative aesthetic principle that ‘everything is sample-able,’ the dark underside of the creative commons. Against this, I would propose we must seek a vision of sampling that does not predate the Real subject, but liberates them from suffering and alienation in the community of sampling. This paper draws on my work on representation in sound studies after the ontological turn, and develops my project aimed at a mutual mutation of sound studies and non-standard philosophy. I apply Katarina Kolozova’s account of alienation, which rethinks Marxism in terms of François Laruelle’s unilateral causality, and her conception of the ‘tender flesh’ of a non-alienated real behind Donna Haraway’s machine-body hybrid. I will speculate on the effect of localizing the machine-body hybrid into the body-electric, whose tender flesh persists and survives within the sample, as an alternative to Christoph Cox’s Deleuzian vision of electronic music as an anti-humanist musical body-without-organs. I will conclude by analyzing a few examples of neoreactionary art, to trace out how we might think anew our relation to sampling from a stance that does not rely on the exploitation of the body-electric’s vibrational labor.
- Geraldine Finn — "What's left of the left"What's left of the leftMy presentation will explore this proposition/question and all its ambiguities not in order to resolve it but to displace it: to put it out of play with a view to changing the coordinates of how we think and practice politics today. The presentation will not rehearse the
various debates about and among ‘the Left’ of the last twenty-years or so—associated with the names of Habermas and Derrida, for example, or Hart and Negri, Foucault, Badiou, Rancière, Nancy, Zizek, Butler, Laclau, et alia—but will rather take those debates as its point of departure for a more radical gesture of suspending the category of ‘the Left’ altogether along with the category of ‘identity’ upon which so much of the politics of ‘the Left’ – under the rubric of ‘progressive’ politics and at the expense of a sustained critique and rejection of capitalism – has now devolved: putting ‘the Left’ and
‘identity’ out of play in order to think and practice politics otherwise. Both are totalizing categories which only function by way of an endless series of inclusions/exclusions which no matter the specifics of their articulations at once rely on and reproduce their own particular series of residues and remainders, remnants, refuse, rejects, and remains—left-out, left-over, left-behind—which continue to insist against the closure of the category: to vibrate, agitate, invigorate, aggravate, resonate and animate the
possibilities and potential of a different politics in/to/from the space-between category and reality, political representation and lived experience. I propose to re-call—re- fashion, re-purpose, re-habilitate, and re-vive—the suspended U-topian moment/motif of political thinking to designate these dis-located dis-placed no-place residues and remains of the space-between and their political potency in order to open up a field of political possibilities without archē or end other than to maintain the openness of the field itself.
This is a speculative rather than a critical project which will focus on music as the sound of the space-between and thus and therefore exemplary of the U-topian moment of resistance and remains that no political category can contain. Ce qui reste à force de musique. - Sebastian Roberts — "Rogue Wave New World"Rogue Wave New WorldMessage Transcript (Monday 5:42pm, June 5, 2017)
It’s Seb.
So, for a while I’ve been exhausted, in the Deleuzian sense, with music: nothing is possible anymore. There’s just too much, every frequency already occupied. If music is defined by the spaces between the notes, what happens when those spaces are all filled up?
We’ve got the nosology of amusia backwards. It’s not a cognitive deficit; it’s a totalizing of auditory apprehension, transtuned to a single vibratory mass—a sound mass. Music is just pareidolia, motivated acoustic reasoning, selective sonic colour-blindness. The failure and faithlessness of apprehension shreds the sound mass, opening the spaces which define music. But those spaces exist because something was erased.
Structure and sense are achieved by excluding some already-existing thing that crippled the structure and made a mockery of the sense. Our reality is a cherry-picked dividend of a broader reality to which we are willfully blind, leaving us totally unprepared when this unified mass of vibration vomits up nonlinear phenomena. Rather than “black swans,” call them what they are: rogue waves, singular catastrophes like March 11th or November 9th that retune the entire sound mass.
These rogue waves may be the best opportunity to rediscover the universality of vibratory entanglement. But how to get people to hear frequencies to which they’ve deliberately deafened themselves? Can I hear from within the totality of the sound mass?
Anyway, I found a group that can help. Sort of a twelve-step thing. We’re meeting on Saturday the 18th. Let me know if you want to join.
3:45 – 5:15 — Panel 3
- Ryan Platt — "Jacob Kierkegaard’s Resonant Sense of the Past"Resonant Sense of the PastAccording to its conventional definition, communication proceeds from origin to destination in a continuous, linear trajectory. Many artists disrupt this pattern with noise, which functions as material excess foreign to meaning— namely, nonsense. Rather than such disruption, this paper examines music and installations that interfere with communication by using continual motion to defer the arrival of transmitted meaning, which produces an oddly uneventful temporality. This temporality emerges in artists’ affinity for walking, whose non-linear motion slows the pace of modern life and reveals neglected dimensions of past and present experience. Admittedly, since audiowalks and soundscapes often depend on pastoral conceptions of the past, it is necessary to consider a corrective example: Jacob Kirkegaard’s sonic portraits of two uninhabitable places, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Kirkegaard’s installations contemplate how past losses incurred in these catastrophes invisibly persist in the present. To create this strange sense of the past’s enduring presence, Kirkegaard uses techniques from Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room. Like Lucier, he recorded recordings of spaces’ resonant frequencies, which permit sound to continuously rebound, thereby deferring its arrival at a meaningful destination and suspending teleological temporality. Furthermore, this process of recording recordings foregrounds the material interval that mediates sound. As such, Kierkegaard’s sounds neither make sense as meaningful communication nor produce disruptive nonsense. As an alternative, I invoke Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of sense (sens) as meaning that is never fully present and cannot be heard or understood, except by listening to sound’s perpetual passage, which Nancy names resonance.
- Paul Hegarty — "The Non-Communicating Vessel/The Empty Chamber"The Non-Communicating VesselWhen Jean-Luc Nancy wrote (in 2002) of listening as a mode of being where the subject would realize that they were an epiphenomenon of listening, a form formed from formless process, he had no idea that the sense of self as echo would reach epidemic proportions in the so-called ‘echo chamber’ effect of social media
groupthink. Recent times have apparently witnessed a growth of people communicating to and within groups that reinforce their own ideas, and favouring those elective truths produced by ‘friend networks’ over other more traditional truth models of aletheia or object correlationism. But instead of critiquing by simply restating all-too- quantifiable ‘facts’ about endogenous truths, what if we thought further on how this ‘echo chamber’ worked and returned it to its sonic origin to do so. After all, what exactly is an echo chamber – is it big, small, round, cylindrical, square, finite, infinite, padded, angular, carpeted, wooden, brutalist, neo-con postmodern in décor? In this paper, I will take for granted the existence of the ‘echo chamber’ to postulate worlds that eschew the ‘critical’ view that the echo chamber is by definition bad, and think of it as a space.
Then, in the second part, I will begin to think about how we function in an echo chamber – would we just be categorically imperative simulacra, replacing shared morality with a view of the world that always bends to my liking? Entitlement over enlightenment? Should we leave the chambers? Surely elective communities are democratic, and should entice us into accepting the ideas produced there? After all, we made those truths. From here, I will begin arguing that the echo chamber is a highly productive space, when operating in parallel, in series, in multiplication. Any one chamber must open to let input in for it to feed its truth-building, and then close around it. Picture if you will (Sagan) an infinite distribution of echo chambers dilating to let stuff in to bounce around in ways that mimic sound so well we may as well imagine it as sound actually echoing. Picture the fronds of all these chambers spreading out, at different scales, and in terms of their modeling, all part of the same distribution. This set of chambers is potentially much greater than the number of human operators, so can begin to work as reality-generating Boltzmann brains, much like financial bot-traders.
This is both good and bad – exciting, because it would constitute an order of simulacra beyond those postulated by Jean Baudrillard, and troubling, because it would be a system based largely on feedback deemed already-acceptable, so is more likely to cohere ‘reality’ into a limited number of beliefs and ideas. So, once again, what is the way out? There is in fact no need to try to leave – the way in is the only way. So, for all the resonant, self-fulfilling easy pleasure of having your own ‘reckonings’ deemed to be true in your preferred echo chamber, and the even deeper pleasure of having that choice removed, so that you prefer what you are in, there is still space in the chamber. Bouncing space, space constructed exactly on the model of sound. This could be space for intervention, for dangerous disruption, or failure of message. But instead of that, what if the more radical move was to shut down what space remained, and aim for emptiness, stasis, non-reflection. Like a less virtuous John Cage, we would renounce what we heard when the echo was removed, and instead of opening up to sound, to new messages, we would aim for the noise of absent sound as the endpoint.
To approach this final point will require a consideration of the end of communication, but the willingness to be attentive to that end. I will bring us back to ‘popular’ texts of outmoded thinking about attention based on unquestioning use of cummunications theory presumptions (Neville Moray, Listening and Attention, Andrew McGhie, Pathology of Attention, both 1969) and the idea of ‘adaptive gullibility’ in biologist R. Haven Wiley’s Noise Matters from 2015. I will also be using the sounds of Aaron Dilloway and Puce Mary, to help us materialize the densification of the echo chamber
to the point where it cannot function. - Joshua Dittrich – "The Cyborg and the Soundscape"The Cyborg and the SoundscapeNeil Harbisson is a cyborg artist with an antenna surgically implanted in the top of his head. The antenna registers light frequencies in Harbisson’s environment and converts them into corresponding sounds that the artist hears through his skull. Harbisson, in effect, hears color with his antenna, and indeed hears specific colors through the sonochromatic software that matches detected quantities of light to a predetermined range of audio frequencies. His creative output is thus premised on the vibratory convertibility of sight and sound though a digital interface, a technologically enabled synaesthesia that gives audible resonance to the visual world and, by the same token, allows a kind of artificial color scheme to be re-imposed on objects, faces, even entire cityscapes and landscapes.
Besides expanding on familiar themes of cyborg performance art (e.g., porous boundaries between bodies/technologies, inside/outside, and the limits of embodied experience), I want to argue that Harbisson explicitly (if problematically) situates the cyborg in the soundscape and prompts us to reconsider what, if anything, soundscape might mean in a digital environment. Can we still speak of that configuration of environment, technology and tuning (equal parts imagination and listening practice) as R. Murray Schafer initially defined it? What are the specificities of sound and listening in a sonified world predicated on the constant trafficking of information across sensory and medial channels? And finally, what happens to the confrontational aesthetics and oppositional politics of the cyborg in Harbisson’s work? Is the user-friendly cyborg artist of today merely the augmented reality purveyor of tomorrow, eager to capitalize on this gimmick of vibratory exchange that swaps sound for sight?
Saturday (18 November)
A Mirror For Recluses
A Mirror For Recluses is a multiple voice incantation of sections lifted from the Speculum Inclusorum, a guide for a sect of medieval nuns called the Anchorites. The Anchorites lived in extreme cloister, permanently cemented into a small cell attached to the exterior walls of a church. Heavily sibilant sounds – those notoriously problematic phenomenon that engineers continuously strive to erase - here are pushed to the forefront of the two minute recording that plays every quarter of the hour, with traces of the chorus resonating into drone between repetitions.
Andrea Oliver (AO) Roberts is a Winnipeg based multidisciplinary artist and musician whose work incorporates sound, print, sculpture, video and performance. Roberts has performed and exhibited internationally with recent solo shows include The Stridents at TRUCK Gallery (Calgary), The Yolk of Menial Light (aceartinc) and group shows at Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), The University of Oakland Art Gallery (Detroit), SomArts (San Francisco), and ArsTechne (Krakow). A co-founder of the now defunct feminist collective NGTVSPC, Roberts writes on sound, affect, gender and technology has performed and collaborated in a number of bands and noise projects including Kursk, Wolbachia, Hoover Death, and their solo project VOR. A recent artist in residence at Brooklyn's Pioneerworks and recipient of the Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, Roberts holds an MFA in Sculpture from California College of the Arts (2014) and a BFA Hons. from the University of Manitoba (2011).
Andrea Oliver (AO) Roberts is a Winnipeg based multidisciplinary artist and musician whose work incorporates sound, print, sculpture, video and performance. Roberts has performed and exhibited internationally with recent solo shows include The Stridents at TRUCK Gallery (Calgary), The Yolk of Menial Light (aceartinc) and group shows at Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), The University of Oakland Art Gallery (Detroit), SomArts (San Francisco), and ArsTechne (Krakow). A co-founder of the now defunct feminist collective NGTVSPC, Roberts writes on sound, affect, gender and technology has performed and collaborated in a number of bands and noise projects including Kursk, Wolbachia, Hoover Death, and their solo project VOR. A recent artist in residence at Brooklyn's Pioneerworks and recipient of the Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, Roberts holds an MFA in Sculpture from California College of the Arts (2014) and a BFA Hons. from the University of Manitoba (2011).
9:00 – Doors open
9:30 – 11 — Panel 4
- James Currie (Lady Baronia Jackson) — "Annihilation"AnnihilationI went down to the shore. But the boat never came that was hired to take me away from all of this. I don’t know why. Perhaps the crew surmised that it was now too dangerous to get close to dry land. I couldn’t see myself spending the rest of my life swimming, and the time still did not seem ripe for jumping in to drown. I couldn’t see a way to make such sinking radiant with beauty. And so there was no option but to turn my back on the sea and return back home once
more. Back to all the noise that humans make. Back to all those who believe that the cure for all this din is to listen better, more and more, to make poor hearing illegal. Poor hearing! Why can’t they just leave her alone! Why should her ear remain endlessly awake! As if insomnia were some kind of virtue! Pah! Sonic vigilance? A vain hope. Didn’t you get the memo? No one’s safe now! Every child stiff with terror in its bed at night in the dark will ultimately fail to keep watch. Eventually the little boy will fall asleep. And then the devil will come. Mark my words. And the only way to vanquish him? It will take the most extraordinary act of courage. You must be prepared to let him find you happy and deaf. - Émile Fromet de Rosnay — "Near Vibratory Disappearance"Near Vibratory DisappearanceExtending work presented at Tuning Speculation IV on the concept of the useless through ‘pataphysic modalities that “taunt the useful,” the current proposal posits an impossible or limitrophic “rustle of language” (Barthes, "Le bruissement de la langue"), a vibratory disappearance both heard and unheard, as a response to the
institutional destruction of experience. Two deaths — one, authorial, jubilatory, leading to the birth of the unheard/of ("innouï") sensory experience yet coterminous with the other one: a death of art through aesthetic spectatorship that is complicated in a flexible logic of exchange common since the 19th Century (Gautier’s “art for art’s sake,” art as “prostitution,” Benjamin’s flâneur etc.) — demand nonetheless renewed modes of resisting the need to justify one's work for results or for the benefit of taxpayers. Mallarmé asked whether it was worthwhile to transpose “natural facts” into their "almost vibratory disappearance [with] the play of language"; unless it were for a “pure Notion,” free from human subjectivity (but
salvaged through it as spectatorship). New materialisms and related approaches, in their near total abandonment of the terrain of language, naïvely reproduce this double logic. Three objectives become clear here: 1. outlining a different genealogy of modern culture in light of a neo-materialist vibratory disappearance within the logic of a double death; 2. asking how this (dis)appearance might challenge assumptions about the role of a "vibratory exchange"; 3. considering ways this double death might itself avoid/invite capture by the logic of contemporary capitalism. - Marcus Boon — "The Continuum of the Octave: Towards a Pluralist Ontology of Music"The Continuum of the OctaveTopos and category theories are powerful aspects of contemporary mathematics, and an important aspect of what Alain Badiou has characterized as "logics of worlds", and Fernando Zalamea has described as a "synthetic philosophy" in which the interlacings of what would seem to be fundamental mathematical modalities
such as geometry and algebra are revealed. Topos theory has been taken up in very different ways as a way of thinking about music by Italian philosopher Guerino Mazzola in his epic text The Topos of Music, and by composer Catherine Christer Hennix in her writings and compositions from the 1970s onwards. In this paper I will explore the political and aesthetic implications of topos and category theory as they relate to ontologies of music, sound and vibration.
11:15 – 12:45 — Panel 5
- Stephanie Rothenberg — "Trading Systems"Trading SystemsFor TS.V, I will be presenting “Trading Systems,” a research-based creative project currently in progress that examines the interplay between the discourses of the natural sciences and cultural systems. I’m specifically interested in the appropriation and re-appropriation of ideology, language, and representation between human/non-human ecologies and how current discourses around themes of resilience and complexity reproduce the logic of neoliberalism. The project retraces the use of the term resilience in the natural sciences beginning in the early 1970s to its more recent application in the social sciences. Within this “biomimetic” mirroring between the organic and the cultural, I aim to question both the potential to illuminate new models and the risk of social engineering. Contemporary research includes the work of Melinda Cooper, James Brassett and David Chandler.
In the initial phase of the project I have been focusing on biological markets, the behaviors of microbes, and their potential in redesigning human economies on both a local and global level. The idea draws from recent studies by microbiologists who are experimenting with ways to manipulate “market conditions” between microbes in order to create more sustainable food production and environmental remediation. Using an anthropomorphic approach, the microbiologists are reframing the microbial behavior in economic terms, examining the way they “exchange goods” or “allocate resources.”
The project takes the form of maps/diagrams and 3D animations, and for TS.V, I will take on the role of a stock trader-biologist to create an audio-visual performative lecture. Explorations include the "vibrational exchange” of a Mark Lombardi political sociogram overlaid with a mycorrhizal fungal network. Through this nonconventional inquiry we will seek to draw out, literally, the cognitive and aural dissonance created when one uses the model of natural ecological systems to identify and rethink the dysfunctional systems of social welfare, political economy, and governance. - Katherine Behar — TBATBATBA
- Margret Grebowicz — "Mountains and Desire"Mountains and DesireOne of the most striking images of Anthropocene congestion to emerge in recent years in National Geographic’s photos of Mt. Everest, showing climbers ascending the Lhotse Face in an exact line like tiny ants, dark against the white snow. In contrast to George Mallory's adage that one climbs a mountain because it’s there, it warns that the mountain won’t be there forever. Today, almost all of the great Himalayan records have been set, one peak still remains to be summited in winter: K2, unconquered due to the high risk of avalanche. “It seems that the vision of heroic death in extremis is even more compelling now—partly because it’s less available to us,” writes mountaineering enthusiast and literary historian Robert McFarlane. But for high altitude climbers, death is as available as ever and K2 will continue to cost climbers their lives. If Everest offers the ultimate proof of McFarlane's worry, K2 offers its opposite, the mountain as brutally recalcitrant and irrevocably “there,” the last frontier of a Nature-without-us. If Everest makes us despair, K2 makes us desire. The avalanche acts as a figure of Nature's mobility and agency, its unpredictability, its very wildness. The race for K2 in winter thus positions us-- its audience--at the edge of the last serious event in the history of mountaineering, which, I argue, will irrevocably change the place and power of wilderness in the Anthropocene imagination. As K2's ever present avalanches rumble in the distance, they illustrate that as much as mountaineering is about desire, wilderness, life-or- death, and bodily autonomy, it is always—and always increasingly—in relation to wealth-building, life-as- slow-death, and bodily docility. What is called the race for K2 is actually this battle of forces over the very meaning of the Himalaya in the current world order.
12:45 – 2:00 — Lunch (provided)
2:00 – 3:30 — Panel 6 (The Occulture)
- David Cecchetto —
- Marc Couroux — “After the Rubicon”
- Ted Hiebert — "Alternating Veracity: Attempt #2"Alternating Veracity: Attempt #2The age of intelligible solutions is over … again. It’s as if history is on repeat, only this time it’s not the late-twentieth century postmodernists proclaiming the death of truth out of radical undecidability, but the political flag-waving of an emergent class of proliferating false-sayers. Except that’s not quite right, since post-truth is also post-falsity and the most radical implications of undecidability are phenomenological not epistemological. That doesn’t really make sense, but the situation doesn’t either, so in some ways it’s deeply unclear whether sense is good anymore as a tool for trying to understand the actual dynamics of the political world that is currently in play. This paper explore some of the nuances and idiosyncrasies of thought in an age nonsense.
- Eldritch Priest — “Ex post facto ex ante”
- Rebekah Sheldon — "Magick’s Science Fiction"Magick’s Science FictionFrom behind the counter at the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, V. Vale began writing and editing a counterculture periodical featuring interviews with and essays by punk musicians, science fiction authors, feminist and queer performance artists, and other “modern primitives.” Typical of the zine’s style, the fourth volume brought together the punk musician Genesis P-Orridge, the science fiction writer William Burroughs, and the painter Brion Gysin. At the time of publication, all three were inventing vibrant new queer aesthetic modes. Perhaps less well known is that all three were also practicing occultists.
Science fiction is not supposed to be found in the precincts of the magickal. Yet, far from anomalous, this issue of Re/Search reflects the pervasive engagement of the science fictional and the occult. Adam Parfrey’s compendium of occult conspiracy Apocalypse Culture (1987) was praised by British science fiction writer J.G. Ballard as “compulsory reading”; the occult hyperstitions of the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit took their inspiration from the mythoi of H. P. Lovecraft, William Gibson, and Burroughs; Philip K. Dick’s novels put gnostic ideas into science fictional frames; and Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism blended science fictional and occult imaginaries.
From the New Age-New Wave of the 60s to the cyberpunk of 90s chaos magick, transgressive cultures have been fostered and given voice by the convergence of science fiction and hermetic craft.
Taking up a range of examples as tutor texts, this presentation will consider the potency of magick’s science fiction for countercultural movements of several kinds, will explore what science fiction and the occult offer to each other, and will theorize how the emplotment of science fiction within magickal epistemologies might deepen and transform our working definitions of science fiction.
3:45 – 5:15 — Panel 7
- David Roden — "It follows: cultivating the auto-immunity of posthuman theory"It followsPosthuman theory is captured in its own headlamps, the absence of constraint on the future married to unbearable irrelevance (Roden 2017b). We do not have or own a future. We were never really in control, since our planetary technical system is too abstracted to be predicted, too amorphous or interpreted, and too large to be felt. Hypermodernity: extreme derangements and shocking metamorphoses. The protean social in Ballard; the intimate coupling of desiring-media in Cronenberg: micro-disconnections that, far from being oriented by the will-to- know or the will-to- nothing (Brassier 2007) are counter-final. The zero horizon which cannot be contained in any idea of progress or reason (Roden 2014, Ch7).
If we do not know what theory teaches, we do not know ourselves any better. Something seemed to think, love, make undertakings, and laugh. Theory hovers over it like a grisly, antique weapon. If every act or thought is lost in its uniqueness and destructibility, we are already overwritten (Haggelund 2008). If everything passes into difference we are already swimming in the medium of fiction. As in David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 horror film, “It Follows” here means that what follows is nothing we can hope for. “Eviscerated and blind, it flops on a sandbar; clings to the last mat of polyp; suckered into new meat, until even our deaths harden into a priapism” (Roden
2017a).
If the future is nothing like us, then we are already inhabited and repeated by what follows, wriggling like sock puppets, “broken”. Our bodies and minds sequestered by “ghost porn”. We are pulled into its net by some dark cosmic flow. And we must wait for this too.
My paper will explore this condition by encouraging theory eat to itself in the form of a plurivocal collage –splicing Cronenberg’s Videodrome with Antonioni’s L’Avventura, with Dominique Janicaud, Quentin Meillassoux and Alain Badiou. Revisiting the deliquescing ontology of the Broken Continent, I will explore of the aftermath of Claudia’s and Sandro’s trip to the Island and the agonizing deal Claudia cuts with the invidious elder entity known as “The Executrix”. Anna, meanwhile, has disappeared from the island. She moves further into the fast attenuating Broken, attends a poorly organised academic conference and takes a would-be angel as a lover. What secret does she carry from the Grain Temple and what does the alliance of Claudia and the Executrix herald for their future? - Gabriele de Seta – "Postnaturalism, antinaturalism, unnaturalism: Pushing phonography beyond its field"Postnaturalism, antinaturalism, unnaturalismThe practice of phonography (and its genre-double of field recordings) are steeped in a naturalism that is both immanent (in its application to documentary inscriptions) and ontological (in the sense proposed by Descola, 2013). It is no surprise that the discourse of phonography echoes inside a dried lexical husk of otherwise widely criticized ethnographic terminology: both practices of inscription (one concerned with human groupings, the other with sound), ethnography and phonography imagine to operate in bounded fields, to map evocative (ethno- or sound-) scapes, documenting naturecultures in need of expert representation. The classical Goffmanian ethnographer is a “well-tuned instrument”, and his (soundly gendered) resonances with his field branch out into histories of ethnomusicological capture, natural field recordings, heroic solidary soundwalks, preserved localities and frozen temporalities.
The naturalist ontology of phonography has survived, almost entirely unscathed, decades of post-structuralist assault on the ethnographic canon (Clifford & Marcus, 1986). As the reflexive turn in ethnographic practice chipped away at objectivity and authority in the writing of cultures, the logocentrifugal nature of phonography shielded it from the bite of critique. This essay individuates three possible directions out of phonographic naturalism: postnaturalism, antinaturalism, and unnaturalism. Drawing on the author’s field recording experiences and on the work of sound artists experimenting with postnatural/antinatural/unnatural sensibilities and techniques, this essay pushes phonography out of its field of naturalist comfort and into the generative domains of vibrational assemblages, negative spectral zones, and unsound phenomena. - Tobias Linnemann Ewé — "…{un}listening with ’pataphonic transduct[IO]n"{un}listening with ’pataphonic transduct[IO]nSound is more than what is heard. How do we turn down the knob of auditory control measures imposed by what Steve Goodman has dubbed »audiosocial predeterminations« such as age, gender, race and class? These audiosocial predeterminations are neither natural nor inherent, but shaped by white heteronormative expectations and technological implementations.
Several vibratory subversions have been proposed in the ongoing battle for the destabilisation of the effects of late capitalism: amplitudal modulations (silent protests by Mexican Zapatistas and Rodgers' pink noise), rhythmic innovations (Eshun’s futurhythmachine and Moten on the break) and viral infections that »soften [white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy]’s shell and dismantles its defenses, so as to build a new world from the scraps« (Laboria Cuboniks’ and xenofeminism). These subversions attempt to destabilise and infect capitalism at full volume, yet the wheels keep churning and it subsumes these provocations into its own being – to the point that we no longer understand its processes or motivations. What if we instead pay ((auditory)) attention to the absurd strangeness of capitalism? How can neoliberal biopolitics be transduced from intangible clamour to digestible byte-sized sound bites? Could capitalism be listened away?
This paper offers a basis for new forms of auditory reimaginations through the smudgy lens of ‘pataphonics. Through a politics of alienation that generates new virtual worlds, I seek a sonic
estrangement – a xenophonia engaged in the longue durée of history. The purpose of this paper is to probe a xenophonic alienation of sound that warps and expands our audiosocial predeterminations and suggests an alternate path for sonic interventions.
5:15 – 7:30 — Dinner break
7:30 – 9:00 — Keynote II
Rasheedah Phillips — "Communal, Quantum and Afro Futurisms: Time & Memory Mapping in Marginalized Communities"
Communal, Quantum and Afro Futurisms
This presentation will explore the history of linear time constructs, notions of the future, and its contrast to indigenous African traditions of space, time, and the future. We explore alternative temporalities embodied by such cultural movements as Afrofuturism, and DIY theories as black quantum futurism, and their use as practical tools for exploring reality and shaping past and future narratives. Phillips will draw on her practical and conceptual perspectives and experiences as a public interest attorney and activist, artist, science fiction writer, and co-founder of Community Futures Lab, a community center designed around principles of Afrofuturism and Black Quantum Futurism.
9:00 – 12:00 — Occultural Soiree featuring an ambient sound-video performance by Ed Keller, sets by DJ |end| (Brussels) & DJcent (TO), and an ambient video by Colin Clark titled The Long (Distributed) WayThe Long (Distributed) WayIn 1968, French sailor Bernard Moitessier departed alone on his sailboat from Plymouth, UK for the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, the first around the world solo sail race. After rounding Cape Horn and on the verge of winning the race, Moitessier sent a message by slingshot onto the deck of a passing ship, informing the Sunday Times of his withdrawal from competition: "I am continuing non-stop... because I am happy at sea and perhaps to save my soul."
Equipped with a Beaulieu 16mm film camera, Moitessier captured moments of his life aboard during this longest-ever non-stop solo circumnavigation. He described using the camera, with its particular ways of seeing, as an essential technique in his process of attunement with the environment at sea, and as a vector for his spiritual expansion. Yet he also acknowledged his camera’s dark power, the way it influenced and demanded his bodily commitment: "I am starting to realize that I too need to be protected from the camera... You have to give the camera something more. And now it is trying to suck my blood."
The Long (Distributed) Way attempts to revive and tune into the energies of Moitessier's voyage—encoded here in a low-resolution MPEG capture of his original film footage that I found on The Pirate Bay. A kind of computational alchemy, The Long (Distributed) Way layers, loops, modulates, distributes, and dissolves Moitessier's blood-pixels in anticipation of uncovering and reactivating some small residue of this attentional spirit.
Sunday (19 November)
9:30 — Doors open
10:00 – 11:00 — Panel 8
- Daniel Lukes – "Hearts Grown Weary: Listening to Black Metal through the Songs of Stephen Foster"Hearts Grown WearyOn the surface, Stephen Foster’s (1826-64) twee parlor and plantation pop songs could not seem further from black metal’s fuzzy forest electric rumble, yet when listening to one alongside or
through the other, an array of similarities become apparent: both display crucial yet anxious relationships to white supremacy through sounds and concepts related to heritage folk, revanchist
nationalist whiteness, and performative appropriations and disavowals of blackness.
Explainers of the enduring popularity of Foster’s music, which continues to be marked by Confederate ideologies, often look to what they describe as an emotional universalism present in his songs: world-weariness, longing, homesickness. Academic studies of Foster are more attentive to the role of intentional sentimentality in his music, which ambiguously employs a blackface aesthetic that upholds the plantation power relations of slavery and white supremacy.
Black Metal, as the oft-repeated joke “Living Color is my favorite black metal band” reveals, is a genre which produces a version of blackness that arguably seeks to exclude the blackness of African racial, ethnic, or musical identities. Yet as Drew Daniel envisions in
“Corpsepaint as Necro-Minstrelsy, or Towards the Re-Occultation of Black Blood” black metal corpsepaint’s relationship to the minstrel show tradition may be read as an inversion of blackface, constructing a demonic revanchist whiteness. Black metal also deploys a highly sentimental worldview, which through a vision of universalizing melancholy seeks to disavow or conceal its own will to white male power. - Stanimir Panayotov — "Black Noise Ruins. Notes after Locrian’s Rain of Ashes"Black Noise RuinsIn an attempt to blur the lines between genres (namely, black metal studies/theory, weird fiction, poetry, and music review), in this presentation I first introduce the problem of “quiddity” in thinking about the metal scene as a generic concept and in thinking about
experiments in metal and noise more particularly. I then offer a definition of “black noise” to address the liminal space created in the fragmentary spaces of metal nowadays, and I take as a specific example the music of the Chicago-based band Locrian, which embodies what I call “black noise.” In between, I experiment with the very form of writing and genres to further rehearse and amplify the effects of black noise beyond the aural, and to prove that “blackness” is not a qualifier reserved for white privilege in the black metal scene. Through the example of Locrian, and more specifically their project “Rain of Ashes,” I claim that “black noise” is a redemptive sub-genre which universalizes various post-capitalistic anxieties in an era of industrial and urban decay, and that it traverses intersectional lines of concern often expressed in metal scenes.
11:15 – 12:45 — Panel 9
- Ed Keller — TBATBATBA
- Mitchell Akiyama & Bethany Ides — "Lossy Relays"Lossy RelaysThe game of Broken Telephone invites player to take pleasure in and amongst the discomfiture of misunderstanding. In the West, it has been known variously as “Chinese Whispers,” “Russian Scandal,” and “Téléphone Arabe.” Its play is and has always been prescient, anticipating both media theories concerned with signal/cybernetics and, nominally at least, the unfathomably efficient (but nonetheless degraded) networks of contemporary geopolitics.
Its play relies on there being a singular message that must travel through a series of receptor and transmission points, whereby its integrity is inevitably degraded. Along the way, an accumulation of affects is likewise exchanged––a brush too close to the neck, a tingle, fizzy sibilance, eyes darting surreptitiously, the hands cupped for secrecy––which would seem to overwhelm the singular signal of the original message. Each personal switchboard is maxed with
sensation. “The probability of a transfer,” Roger Caillois posited, is what a player accepts as the premise for any game, even as she concedes (demands?) that none of what is generated therein
transfer outside of the game, even to another round. And it is this same distinction that qualifies the auto-telic as being expressly unfit for replication, professionalization or commodification.
We propose an intermediate immersion: the development of a game that posits the brokenness of networked global capitalism, a game that uses no boards or pieces or wires, a game that mixes messages, monies and other morals, one that stubbornly does not work and will not make meaning, but rather riles risk and reciprocal trust via signal tenderness. - Nicholas Knouf — "Intimely vibrations, or how to be in time with radio"Intimely vibrationsWe've read those untimely meditations. We've been disturbed by that untimely event. But what about the intimely? This locution implies an intensifying expansion of our experience of time, one that does not consider the present moment as anything other than the present, a duration that does not augur a utopian or apocalyptic future or hearken to a pastoral or barbaric past. Let's foreground the in at the expense of the un, a slight distinction that still possesses the contradictory valence of an un, but also travels with continuations, movements towards, a being within time, in time.
Perhaps this is a moment not of the future but rather of the present. Perhaps now, after the future, we can finally be in time.
Let's consider those artists and scientists who still live within the vibrations of that part of the electromagnetic spectrum we call radio. Tracing the radionic perturbations of the cosmos, yearning for radiophonic signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, listening to radio transmissions of metal objects orbiting the earththis is a Herzian spacetime, a milieu that preexisted us and will continue long after we are gone. The radio spectrum is. We are attuned to this through technology that has not changed dramatically in the hundred years since Marconi sutured two continents together through artificial modulations of this spacetime. Let's use these examples as a speculative experiment in understanding media without a futurist teleology, where we choose to not let media become obsolete and are rather engaged in a relationship of care with the spectrum and the media used to access it.
1 PM — Wrap-Up!