Sonic Acts is an interdisciplinary arts organisation based in Amsterdam. 

Founded in 1994 to present new developments in electronic and digital art forms, Sonic Acts has gained prominence with its biennial international festival — an intensive art, theory and technology gathering motivated by changes in the ecological, political, technological and social landscape.
 
Sonic Acts is a leading platform for international projects, research and the commissioning and co-production of new artworks, often working together with local and international partner organisations such as independent and institutional cultural incubators, universities and kindred festivals.

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Sonic Acts Biennial festival 2022 takes place across Amsterdam from 30 Sep – 23 Oct.

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Sonic Acts Biennial 2022: Festival celebrating art, technology and science.

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Join our team!

Arjuna Neuman

Earlier this year, artist, filmmaker and writer Arjuna Neuman led a workshop focusing on the practice of making mixtapes as part of our Practicum series. During the workshops, participants were invited to bring a selection of songs that together would explore the ecological unconscious of contemporary Black music and then make a collective mixtape that imagined the world as otherwise. Listen to the outcome of the workshop below.

The mixtape was made after a session in which the group shared the songs they brought and discussed the untold history of the Blues, how along with its roots in West Africa, it was also deeply inspired by Indigenous music and culture local to Mississippi. [Find out more about 'Tangle Eye' here.](https://www.sonicacts.com/discover/tangle-eye-worldbuilding-with-mixtapes-a-workshop-by-arjuna-neuman)

Practicum is a programme organised by Sonic Acts that focuses on applied knowledge, making from research and learning together. It takes the form of a series of workshops, reading and listening groups, and excursions.

Thanks again to all of the participants: Allison Figueroa Rojas, Anika Paris, Balam Ronan, Simon Delgado, James Goodwin, Obden Mondesir, Stephanie Korab and Zuqiang Peng. The mix was made by Allison Figueroa Rojas and Balam Ronan.

**Tracklist:**

1. LIM Giong - A Pure Person (林强-单纯的人, 2001）
2. Moodymann - Amerika (1997)
3. Moor Mother - Chain Gang Quantum Blues (2016)
4. Meril Wubslin _ Elida (Original song by: Michel Legris)
5. Navy Blue - Journey Into a Dream
6. Liquid Bloom (Amani Friend)- Shaman's Eye - Roots of the Earth
7. Mabe Fratti - El Sol Siege Ahi ( the Sun is still there)
8. Mabe Fratti + Concepcion Huerta - Estatica (Static)
9. Aduo - Cicadas Know （阿朵 - 蝉知道, 2021）
10. Blind Willie Johnson - Dark was the night, cold was the ground
11. Wiley - Eskimo - Interlude
12. Sun Ra - When there is no Sun
13. Cyril Cyril _ La Ville
14. Hyperculte _ Chaos
15. Jim Morrison - An American Prayer extended
16. Sade - feel no pain (1992)/ dj slackboi screwed version (2008)
17. Kanye West - Real Friends
18. Pink Floyd - Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun
19. Minnie Ripperton - Les Fleurs
20. Arca - Desafío (Challenge)
21. Sanpuy - The Road ( 桑布伊- 路, covered by 邱军 QIU Jun, 2012)

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Listen to Tangle Eye: Worldbuilding with Mixtapes

Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 takes place from 30 September to 23 October at various locations across Amsterdam. Three weekends of exhibition visits, performances and talks will be accompanied throughout October by in/outdoor sound installations, workshops, excursions and other public events.

For almost three decades, Sonic Acts has sought to celebrate new developments in electronic and digital artforms. We're excited to now reveal Sonic Acts Biennial 2022, staged across various locations in October, interweaving three weekends of exhibition openings, a sound programme, symposium, installations, artist presentations, workshops and more to be announced.

The biennial international festival has gained prominence since 1994 as an intensive art, theory and technology gathering that is motivated by changes in the ecological, political, and social landscapes.  Sonic Acts is back in full force this year, stretching beyond its standard format. Already a leading platform for international projects, research and the commissioning and co-production of new artworks, this edition reaffirms its dedication to supporting artists in ever-changing circumstances. Through artistic investigations and research, the organisation advances experimentation and provides a podium for dynamic perspectives, which can in turn be tools for discovery, growth, development, and emancipation.

This year’s edition of Sonic Acts’ biennial emphasises collaborative knowledge creation, as well as experimental sound and moving image that attunes and responds to ecological thinking. Through thought-provoking interventions, the biennial asks how we can care, collectively and despite exhaustion of energies, for what we cannot see or understand. The three weekends around which the biennial revolves provide a slow immersion into the environmental humanities and contemporary art practices responding to the urgency of pollution.

# one sun after another
Taking its name from a line in Etel Adnan’s powerful collection of poetry _The Arab Apocalypse_ (1989), _one sun after another_ takes place from **30 September** to **23 October** at three locations – **W139**, **Zone2Source** in Amstelpark and **Het HEM** in Zaandam. Expanding the long-term Sonic Acts research focus on the implications of the climate crisis, the exhibition traces the inextricable nature of pollution and time, moving across ecological and temporal scales.

With works by **Andrea Galano Toro** • **Cesar Majorana** • **Danny Osborne**, **Patrick Thompson**, **Alexa Hatanaka**, **Sarah McNair-Landry**, **Eric McNair-Landry**, **Erik Boomer** and **Raven Chacon** • **Félix Blume** • **John Grzinich** • **Julian Charrière** • **Leanne Wijnsma** • **Louis Braddock Clarke** and **Zuzanna Zgierska** • **Lucky Dragons** (**Sarah Rara**, **Luke Fischbeck**) • **Maryam Monalisa Gharavi** and **Sam Lavigne** • **MELT** (**Isabel Paehr**, **Ren Loren Britton**) • **Seline Buttner** • **Tomoko Sauvage**.



# Sound Art
During the second weekend of Sonic Acts Biennial 2022, **7** to **9** **October**, Sonic Acts presents an extensive sound art programme at **Het HEM** and other venues across Amsterdam. Het HEM will host a radical diffusion of sound in space: an iteration of INA GRM’s Acousmonium, built in collaboration with Sonic Acts for the 2022 Biennial. The former munitions factory turned contemporary art centre sets the stage for immersive, auditory encounters which engage with Sonic Acts’ enduring focus on sonic ecologies and pollution. The programme features musical performances, audiovisual works, immersive installations, site-specific field explorations and  workshops, with more to be announced.

# Leaving Traces
The Sonic Acts symposium convenes over the weekend of **15** to **16 October** with a series of talks and workshops on the interconnected ways that pollution affects all things living and nonliving. Focusing on an extractive relationship to the Earth, participants will be led by international artists and thinkers at **Likeminds** in Amsterdam, with the evening performance programme taking place both there and at **Singelkerk**. _Leaving Traces_ asks how we can care, collectively, for others amidst toxicities that so often evade human perception.
 
Leading on from the discursive programme, Sonic Acts is honoured to present a newly commissioned chapter of Aura Satz's feature film Preemptive Listening, made in collaboration with sound artist BJ Nilsen. The symposium will close with evening performances by an exciting lineup of sound artists.

With talks and presentations from **Angeliki Balayannis** • **Aura Satz** • **Dani Admiss** • **Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou** and **Agnès Villette** • **Mary Maggic** • **MELT** (**Isabel Paehr**, **Loren Britton**) • **Nerea Calvillo** • **Sasha Engelmann** and **Sophie Dyer**. 

More names to be announced soon.

# About Sonic Acts

Sonic Acts, founded in 1994, produces a biennial festival with a strong focus on contemporary developments at the intersections of audio-visual art, science and theory. Each edition explores the chosen thematics by means of a broad spectrum of fields, practices and disciplines. Sonic Acts is an organisation that stimulates and supports research, development and production of work by giving it a stage and commissioning new work and events, often in collaboration with international festivals, arts organisations, funders and other partners.

→ Read about the [programmes](https://www.sonicacts.com/agenda)

→ Purchase Early Bird passes via [Eventbrite](https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sonic-acts-biennial-2022-tickets-376107897847)

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Sonic Acts announces 2022 Biennial in October

As Sonic Acts continues to grow and bring you an engaging programme of activities, we are delighted to reveal a brand-new visual identity and website for Sonic Acts. **Catalogtree**, a multidisciplinary design studio based in Arnhem (NL), is behind the identity and concept of this website, working with designer and coder **Janine Zielman** on its development into its current form. 

This up-to-date identity emerges as a visual reflection on the discursive complexities so often encountered in interdisciplinary research, crafting a website that is both steadfast under pressure, while at the same time constantly changing, shifting, and growing with public  interaction. Our new logo, here animated, is built into the code of the website, its movement beginning at a new starting point as each user travels through the site.

Not only aesthetically fresh, sonicacts.com now also includes a host of archival content. In the [Discover](https://www.sonicacts.com/discover) section of the new site, uncover past iterations of the festival, programmes, workshops and events, as well as video interviews, commissioned artworks, exploratory podcasts to listen to and engaging long read articles. Here you'll also find an overview of release and publications, including the latest issues of Ecoes magazine. There’s an [Agenda](https://www.sonicacts.com/agenda) so you can stay up to date with our upcoming events, and a [Community](https://www.sonicacts.com/community) section where you can find artists, researchers and thinkers who have collaborated with Sonic Acts over the years. For the nostalgic amongst you, you can find our old website archived at portal.sonicacts.com, but do stay tuned for more exciting developments to come in Sonic Acts’ online presence.



Catalogtree is a multidisciplinary design studio based in Arnhem (NL). It was founded in 2001 by Daniel Gross and Joris Maltha who met at Werkplaats Typografie. Nina Bender was part of the studio from 2011 until 2020. The studio works continuously on commissioned and self initiated projects. Highly interested in self-organising systems they believe in 'Form Equals Behaviour'. Experimental tool-making, programming, typography and the visualisation of quantitative data are part of their daily routine.

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New Visual Identity for Sonic Acts 

Interested in subscribing to Ecoes? You can now get the magazine delivered to your front door! Subscriptions are available both on a recurring and one time basis and come in a range of options for [individual](https://shop.sonicacts.com/product/ecoes-subscription-reoccurring/), [student](https://shop.sonicacts.com/product/ecoes-student-subscription-reoccurring/), and [institutional](https://shop.sonicacts.com/product/institutional-ecoes-subscription-recurring/) subscriptions. 

Ecoes is a periodic magazine from Sonic Acts about art in the age of pollution. The magazine continues Sonic Acts’ emphasis on artists and thinkers that propose alternatives to the anthropocentric view that sees Earth and the non-human world as an endless resource. Our most recent edition of Ecoes considers the upcoming edition of Sonic Acts Festival 2022. Images and texts combine to reveal the elemental forces, synthetic or natural, that create tension in the world around us.

[Visit our webshop to learn more →](https://shop.sonicacts.com/)

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Ecoes Subscription Now Available

Aura Satz

Artist, freelance journalist & photographer

Agnès Villette 

MELT

Andreas Kühne

pantea

Noam Youngrak Son

Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou

Louis Braddock Clarke

Independent curator, researcher, educator & soothsayer

Dani Admiss

Antonia Alampi

Angeliki Balayannis

Yolanda Ariadne Collins

Sophie Dyer

Sasha Engelmann

John Grzinich

Mary Maggic

Andrea Galano Toro

The third issue of _Ecoes_, Sonic Act’s periodic magazine about art in the age of pollution, is out now. Leading on from its previous instalments, the latest _[Ecoes](https://www.sonicacts.com/discover/magazine-ecoes-issue-3)_ reimagines and reroutes an anthropocentric vision of the Earth and nonhuman entities as a limitless resource.

Ahead of the upcoming Sonic Acts Festival 2022, _Ecoes_ delves into the legacies of toxic infrastructures and hazardous waste, uncovering ways of reclaiming and refiguring definitions of ‘normal’ and ‘natural’, multi-scalar and multi-sited journeys of microbes, eels, glaciers and unstable polder grounds. Throughout this voluminous issue, images and texts combine to reveal the elemental forces, synthetic or natural, that create tension in the world around us. Contemporary theoretical discourse and speculative fiction on weather as a tool to destabilise knowledge traditions, interviews with artists whose practices invite us to look and listen anew, and one inlay, a map to move within non-normative time – all gather to create a rigorous, diverse and visually striking edition.

Featured artists and thinkers include **Dani Admiss**, **Antonia Alampi**, **Angeliki Balayannis**, **Louis Braddock Clarke**, **Zuzanna Zgierska**, **Yolanda Ariadne Collins**, **Sophie Dyer**, **Sasha Engelmann**, **John Grzinich**, **Andreas Kühne**, **Mary Maggic**, **Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou**, **Agnès Villette**, **MELT** (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr), **Aura Satz**, **Noam Youngrak Son**, **Andrea Galano Toro** and **pantea**.

→ _Ecoes_ is available to order from the [Sonic Acts webshop](https://shop.sonicacts.com/product/ecoes3/)

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Ecoes issue #3 out now

On Friday 22 April evening, another memorable rendition of Night Air took place at OT301, Amsterdam – the city built on sand.

Digging into the relationship between sand, the history of pollution and economy, the event featured an audiovisual work by **Félix Blume**, talks from scholars **Jeff Diamanti** and **Michaela Büsse**, as well as films from **Enar de Dios Rodríguez**, **Maika Garnica**, **Ans Mertens** and **Yanjin Wu**. In the latter part of the evening, artist **Farzané** delivered a showcase of her performance LÖSS, before DJs **Femi**, **TAAHLIAH**, **Snufkin** and **Europa** took over for the night.

→ Browse through our photos on [Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/sonicacts/albums/72177720298401833/with/52030849486/).

_Shifting Sands_ brought into focus the ecological impacts of sand excavation and consumption, which are marred by displacement and continuous colonial expansion. Shores, dunes and deserts were all figures that followed us throughout the evening. Firstly, sound artist **Félix Blume**’s Desierto (2021, 24’) transported the audience to altiplano Potosino in central Mexico, a major gold and silver mining hub. Commissioned by ARTE Radio, the piece is filled with recordings from these elevated plains, emphasising that the desert, far from being hostile, is prolific with life. Through their invigorating talks, scholars **Jeff Diamanti** and **Michaela Büsse** traced the flows of particulate matter – dust, emissions, pollen, sand – as they are situated and carried across geological time. **Enar de Dios Rodríguez**’ film _Vestiges_, along with **Pia Borg**’s _Silica_, **Maika Garnica** and **Ans Mertens**’ _Interlude_, and _15” Sand Economy_ film loops, punctuating the intermissions by Yanjin Wu took us through the politics and poetics of sedimentary rock. Setting particles skittering, **Farzané** showcased _LÖSS_, a sound performance simulating the system dynamics of sand formations that served as a model for critical states and self-organisation. Finally, DJs **Femi**, **TAAHLIAH**, our very own **Snufkin**, and **Europa** delivered the last blast, shaking the sand from beneath our feet.

## Night Air
_Night Air_ is a series of events that aims to make pollution visible by bringing forth the various side-effects of modernity: from colonial exploitation of people and resources to perpetual inequalities brought about by the destruction of the environment and common land – in other words, destructive capitalist practices that shape both our environment and human-nonhuman relations.

**Night air is a myth with its origins in miasma theory (from the Greek for ‘pollution’). The theory held that smelly air from decaying organic matter caused illness. The smell would intensify and worsen by night, so night air became synonymous with poisonous and noxious vapours that could even cause pandemics such as cholera or plague. Only with developments in medicine and various scientific endeavours around the London cholera epidemic in the mid-1800s, did germs replace the ‘unhealthy fog’ as the culprit for diseases. And now, even though the idea has been abandoned, night air still echoes in words such as malaria (‘bad air’ in Italian), which actually connects air-borne poison with flying pests such as the disease-carrying mosquitoes.

→ Stay informed about future events! Subscribe to the [Sonic Acts Newsletter](https://sonicacts.us6.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=f8f2c0dae61384c2dba08e8ec&id=87c02476f0).

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Looking back on Shifting Sands

Sarah Fitterer

Erik Peters

Sonic Acts is delighted to announce that duo **Anguille Vannamei** – composed of Noam Youngrak Son and Sarah Fitterer – and **Erik Peters** have been selected for the second iteration of the Underexposed mentorship programme.  

Underexposed is an online mentorship and training programme focused on supporting young, Netherlands-based artists during the early stages of their careers. It offers a mentorship period in which selected artists work with members of the Sonic Acts curatorial team, providing an opportunity to get feedback and professionalise their practice. More specifically, this round of Underexposed centres in particular on assisting artists with conceptualising their work, mostly in text or writing, and helps them improve the way they present artistic concepts, projects, plans and budgets in grant applications and other (public) presentations. 

**Anguille Vannamei** and **Erik Peters** follow **[Angeliki Diakrousi](https://sonicacts.com/portal/news/angeliki-diakrousi-found-in-transmissions)** and **[Yara Said](https://sonicacts.com/portal/news/yara-said-sound-as-a-carrier-bag-of-memories-and-traumas)**, who were selected to take part of the first iteration of Underexposed between May and June 2021. The second instalment will take place over a similar, six-week period from April to June 2022.

**Anguille Vannamei** comprises **Noam Youngrak Son** and **Sarah Fitterer**, two artists who find themselves in continual attunement. The pair's research topics frequently overlap and intersect, finding fertile ground for cross pollination. For instance, as Noam began querying how eels might perceive human sex, Sarah was investigating anthropocentric visualisations of shrimp intercourse. SPA, their first collaborative project, reflects critically on the exploitative and profit-driven relationship between humans and aquatic species. Noam is an interdisciplinary media designer who attempts to convey the stories of marginalised bodies into designed forms. Sarah is a researcher, artist and occasional activist exploring the values that our food systems are built upon. Having both graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven, their works have been featured at the Venice Biennale, MU Eindhoven, Gogbot Museum of the Future and Re:Kultura, Kraków.

[d-act.org](https://www.d-act.org/about)

[fittererr.com](https://www.fittererr.com/)



**Erik Peters** engages with the world-building potentialities seeded in the act of storytelling, uncovering how speculative fiction can germinate new universes of being. His research-based practice is situated in the multi-porous web of independence of ecologies and technologies, human and non-human beings. Within his work, queer methodologies are evoked to create multidiscipinary scenarios; imaginative fables staged as spatial and interactive installations, workshops, publications and audiovisual works. Since graduating cum laude from AKI ArtEZ Enschede in Crossmedia Design, Erik has gone on to study Design for Art Direction at the London College of Communication, as well completed a course in Philosophy of Technology and Design at the University of Twente.

[Erikpeters.work](https://erikpeters.work/)

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Anguille Vannamei & Erik Peters Selected for Underexposed 

On Saturday 26 March, interdisciplinary designer **Noam Youngrak Son** led participants online and in person at W139, Amsterdam, in a collaborative writing process as part of the [first workshop](https://sonicacts.com/portal/sonic-acts-practicum-1) in the **Sonic Acts Practicum series**: _The Story-Telling Eel-Orgy – Writing as an Aquatic Intercourse_. The result of this workshop was the publication of a unique zine, centred around text generated by attendees – with the interference of an algorithm.

Photos are now available to browse [online](https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjzJQQb).

The following quotes are extracted from the workshop participants' collaborative writing process:  

"My past, my present, my future. Is drown by circular motions. No start, no end, no middle. Only tinkering movements, entangling my being to become."  

"Squiggle squiggle across the currents of my being I just want to merge with a giant teddy bear from a pool of unlimited intercourse."  

"As a hydrophobic creature I am terrified of water. Scrimping eels in a puddle right there, the residue from my flesh can cling there if it wants to, that can be my legacy."  

Visit **Noam Youngrak Son**'s [website](https://www.d-act.org/eelorgyarchive.html) to find out more about the workshop, discover the zine, and keep scrolling to produce unique combinations of text – ad infinitum. 

The Story-Telling Eel-Orgy: A Workshop by Noam Youngrak Son

The Story-Telling Eel-Orgy

Susan Schuppli 

On the evening of Thursday 31 March at OT301 in Amsterdam, **Melting Cores** took place as an iteration of the Night Air event series. 

Exploring the politics of climate archiving, elemental collapse, and the (de)centralisation of cultural perspectives, **Melting Cores** included a talk from **Louis Braddock-Clarke** and **Zuzanna Zgierska**, a screening of **Takashi Makino**’s _Generator_ and **Susan Schuppli**’s _Ice Cores_ (with Q&A) as well as _Transients I/O_ performed by **Andreas Kühne**, followed by DJ sets from **Why Be** and **Yantan Ministry**. All proceeds from the night’s ticket sales were donated to [Giro555](https://giro555.nl/oekraine-de-hulp/?utm_source=Newsletter+Sonic+Acts&utm_campaign=a99f94199a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_04_17_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_87c02476f0-a99f94199a-558538553&mc_cid=a99f94199a&mc_eid=11d61b2a0c) for aid to Ukraine.

Recordings of the talks will be available online soon. In the meantime, browse through our photos on [Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/sonicacts/albums/72177720298051442/with/51998442567/).



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Looking back at Night Air: Melting Cores

Getting our hands, eyes and ears dirty, **_Practicum_** is a **new yearly programme organised by Sonic Acts** that focuses on applied knowledge, making from research and learning together. It takes the form of a series of workshops, reading and listening groups, and excursions **taking place from March to October 2022 in Amsterdam and online**.   

Open to all, these gatherings are artist-led and emphasise collaborative, hands-on learning: attuning and creating together in ways that entangle modes of perception, production and knowledge-creation. _Practicum_ means making equal participants in anti-nuclear activism, spatial sound, listening and thinking sonically, writing speculative stories or reading together.  

Though thematically varied, most workshops address ecological concerns, such as making synthesisers from e-waste, (deep) reading about climate change in relation to different approaches to time, or making radioactive pollution visible.  

**Each workshop will feature a separate open call** with a different set of parameters. Below is a short overview of the first workshops in the _Practicum_ series. 

# The Story-Telling Eel-Orgy: Writing as an Aquatic Intercourse
**by Noam Youngrak Son**

**26 March, offline (now sold out) at [W139](https://w139.nl/en/) and online (still available)**\
→ [Find out more & sign up to join online](https://sonicacts.homerun.co/workshop/en)\
This ‘story-telling orgy’ turns participants into freshwater eels gathered in the Sargasso Sea to have sex. Taking inspiration from the complex and enduringly obscure reproductive cycle of eels, the workshop involves collaborative and generative writing processes, with participants producing short stories about water that will be combined into a riso-printed zine. 
d-act.org   


# When I Sound, I am Speaking – Als ik klink, dan spreek ik
**by Polina Medvedeva & Andreas Kühne**

_**5 & 12 April, IMC Weekendschool**_\
Aimed at young adolescents, the workshop focuses on the sense of listening as a starting point for experimental sound creation. It follows the framework of the Erasmus+ project _Sound Experiments – New Approaches to Non-formal Learning in Music_, and is organised in collaboration with the IMC Weekendschool in Amsterdam.\
[andreaskuhne.net](andreaskuhne.net)\
[polinamedvedeva.net](polinamedvedeva.net)   


# Rest Assured
**by MELT – Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr**

_**30 April & 14 May, online 
Includes closed captions & an ISL Interpreter**_\
→ [Find out more & sign up now](https://sonicacts.homerun.co/rest-assured/en)\
Sonic Acts’ Overexposed residents MELT present a reading group on non-normative ways of experiencing, theorising, materialising, subverting and being in time. Taking place over two online meetings, plus informal contact in between over Signal, Rest Assured invites participants to rest – to feel assured in their need to rest, to rest their bodies alongside some texts, and unfold what emerges together.\
[meltionary.com](meltionary.com)\
[overexposed.sonicacts.com/neveroddoreven](overexposed.sonicacts.com/neveroddoreven)   


# Tangle Eye: World-Building with Mix-Tapes
**by Arjuna Neuman**

_**31 May & 3 June, online**_\
Making mixtapes is a practice of untrained amateurs (often for sharing between lovers), but it is also the medium of bedroom producers through to label-produced pop artists. Because of this wide reach, mixtapes have the potential to carry deeply subversive and critical content to unlikely audiences. Together we will create a collective mixtape that explores the ecological unconscious of contemporary Black music. Along the way we will learn some basic audio editing skills, as well as how to start thinking/speculating sonically.\
[overexposed.sonicacts.com/for-lula](overexposed.sonicacts.com/for-lula)   


# Data Scraping
**by Sam Lavigne**

_**June (date to be confirmed), online**_\
Sam Lavigne is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing and automation. Combining aspects of data journalism, conceptual art and hoarding, this online workshop offers a methodology to make sense of a world in which everything we do is mediated by internet companies. It focuses on scrapism or the practice of web scraping for artistic, emotional and critical ends. 
[lav.io](lav.io)   


# DIY E-Waste Analogue Synthesiser
**by Mina Kim**

_**18 June, online/offline**_\
Mina Kim is an artist, researcher and performer based in the Netherlands and South Korea, who repurposes discarded media technology. Participants will join her in coexisting with the digital debris from our digital society and in exploring its relationship to the environment. This starts with making a simple circuit that connects e-waste together to create unique e-sounds and results in an analogue synthesiser made out of electronic garbage.\
[mina-vitamina.net](mina-vitamina.net)   


# Nuclear Polders
**by Agnès Villette & Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou**

_**Details to be confirmed**_\
Nuclear energy was recently labelled as green energy by the EU, yet several ageing nuclear infrastructures are threatened by climate change. As shorelines creep inland and weather conditions worsen, the fragility of these structures comes to the fore. On the coasts of France, Belgium and the Netherlands, lie three nuclear power stations – Gravelines, Doel, Borsselle – that share the mutable soil of the polder landscape. Nuclear Polders investigates entanglements at play in these locations, beginning with a workshop on nuclear activism and visual culture.\
[agnesvillette.com](agnesvillette.com)   


# Spatial Sound
**by Ji Youn Kang**

_**Details to be confirmed**_\
A composer, sound artist and teacher at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague, Ji Youn Kang presents a workshop on spatial sound. The workshop includes hands-on activities together with deep listening sessions and discussions – addressing both theoretical and practice-based aspects. It will cover some technical ground, but also explore artistic applications for fixed media and live electronic music composition.\
[jiyounkang.com](jiyounkang.com)

Practicum.png

Practicum – A New Sonic Acts Programme

Sonic Acts is inviting young artists to apply for a new round of Underexposed, an online mentorship and training programme focused on supporting artists at the beginning of their career. A successful [first round](https://sonicacts.com/portal/news/open-call-underexposed---mentorship-programme-for-young-artists-?utm_source=Test+List&utm_campaign=c980e0e4db-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_04_17_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_baa59c8c56-c980e0e4db-&mc_cid=c980e0e4db&mc_eid=UNIQID) in 2021 resulted in the mentorship of [Angeliki Diakrousi](https://sonicacts.com/portal/news/angeliki-diakrousi-found-in-transmissions?utm_source=Test+List&utm_campaign=c980e0e4db-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_04_17_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_baa59c8c56-c980e0e4db-&mc_cid=c980e0e4db&mc_eid=UNIQID) and [Yara Said](https://sonicacts.com/portal/news/yara-said-sound-as-a-carrier-bag-of-memories-and-traumas?utm_source=Test+List&utm_campaign=c980e0e4db-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_04_17_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_baa59c8c56-c980e0e4db-&mc_cid=c980e0e4db&mc_eid=UNIQID). Two other Netherlands-based artists will be selected for the programme, which will take place from 20 April – 1 June 2022.

## General information

Similarly to last round, the programme provides support and mentorship to develop two young artists looking to professionalise their artistic practice. More specifically, this round focuses in particular on supporting artists in conceptualising their work, mostly in text or writing, and helps them improve the way they present artistic concepts, projects, plans and budgets in grant applications and other (public) presentations. Over the course of the six-week mentorship programme, artists will work directly with members of the Sonic Acts curatorial team in one-hour weekly online sessions where the team will provide feedback, support and insights into the artist's specific needs.   


## Programme

Writing an effective artistic proposal/grant application  
Creating a presentation and a project plan  
Developing realistic planning and a production budget  
Working on artist’s portfolio  
Exploring local and international presentation and commissioning opportunities  
An in-depth interview about the artist’s practice that will be published on Sonic Acts’ website and in Ecoes magazine  


## Eligibility

Underexposed is intended for young artists, 22 to 32 years of age, based in the Netherlands. The programme is open to makers, artists and designers working with experimental sound or moving image, and with a strong interest in ecological issues, who have graduated from art academies or similar artistic programmes, or can demonstrate interest in the field with at least one year of experience. Currently enrolled students are not eligible for the programme, but students graduating in 2022 are welcome to apply. Applications from both individual artists and collectives are welcome.  


## Requirements

Application texts should be in English and must include the following:   

Project plan or grant proposal that you would like to improve (max 1500 words), including a project budget for max. 40.000,- EUR  

A motivation letter (max 1000 words) in which you provide the following information: Give a short summary of the project including the current stage of development; Outline why you applied for Underexposed and your expectations of the programme; The main challenges you face and what you need help with most   

Portfolio, including a short bio (bio max 300 words, max 10 MB)  

Contact details and CV   


## Deadlines and selection committee

Applications should be submitted via [Homerun](https://sonicacts.homerun.co/underexposed-mentorship-programme-2022/en) by **1 April 2022**  

Selected applicants will be notified by 20 April 2022  

The selection committee comprises the curatorial team of Sonic Acts

25502984.jpg

Open Call: Underexposed – Mentorship Programme for Young Artists

Delve into another layer of time, and of this ongoing project from OVEREXPOSED residents MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr). Interwoven across online and print media, _never odd or even_ explores multiple overlapping perspectives on numerous temporalities. As the project unfolds in various stages and formats, this latest development presents an essay and transparent inlay and in digital and physical form.   

Both will be published in the forthcoming Issue #3 of [Ecoes](https://sonicacts.com/sashop/product/ecoes/), a periodic magazine from Sonic Acts about art in the age of pollution. The inlay can be physically overlaid on a laptop screen [to fit the ‘map’ on their website](https://overexposed.sonicacts.com/neveroddoreven/inlay). The essay explores many of the same temporalities addressed on the website – and more – in theory and in detail, spanning perspectives that intersect physics, hormone therapy, disability studies and climate change, among many others. Both essay and interlay can also be viewed on the [_never odd or even_ site](https://overexposed.sonicacts.com/neveroddoreven/map), and the article can be read [digitally in .pdf form](https://api.melt.karls.computer/uploads/ECOES_MELT_accessible_final_6bd557a3b6.pdf).  

The never odd or even site also already features multiple works that consider non-normative ways of experiencing, theorising, materialising and subverting being in time – opening to different temporalities through its evolving tabs: Map, Colophon, Meditation, Lecture and Ice.   

Visit the website [here](https://overexposed.sonicacts.com/neveroddoreven/map).

never odd or even

MELT add new layers to artwork 'never odd or even'

After multiple years preparing this work, we could not have expected a sadder occasion to celebrate the latest release as part of Murmansk Prospekt, a collaboration between Fridaymilk and Sonic Acts.  

_Settlers_ is a vinyl release from sound artist & researcher **Sergey Kostyrko**: a 12” whose two sides present very different faces of the social landscape of Murmansk, the largest settlement above the Arctic circle.   

Side A, _Murmansk Soundscape_, provides an uninterrupted window onto the city at work. From the nearby town of Nikel, Kostyrko presents a field recording cherry picked from extensive research trips around the area. Its widescreen soundscape captures a distinctive sonic landscape marked by the sounds of trains, ships, harbour cranes and howling wind.   

Meanwhile, Sounds of Migration on Side B presents a dynamic noise composition generated by an automated sonification: one unedited take of a modular synthesiser communicating with a data model. That data tracks the migration statistics of the Russian North, as it has been increasingly abandoned over recent decades. In Murmansk specifically, the population has dropped from almost half a million in 1989 to 300,000 in 2020, with a resulting deterioration of conditions for those left behind. The result is a rich, percussive track – a visceral expression of a city sparking with complexity, even as it slowly drains away.  

[Order now from Bandcamp](https://sergeykostyrko.bandcamp.com/album/settlers)

_Settlers is released alongside [Transients I/O by Andreas Kühne](https://sonicacts-frontend.vercel.app/news/transients-io-by-andreas-khne-out-now). Both releases were developed as part of Murmansk Prospekt, and commissioned by Sonic Acts (NL) and Fridaymilk (RU). [Order both releases together from the Sonic Acts webshop](https://sonicacts.com/sashop/product/pre-order-package-deal-transients-i-o-settlers/)_

**Murmansk Prospekt** is a collaboration between Sonic Acts and [Fridaymilk](http://www.fridaymilk.com/en/), exploring the ways that artistic and speculative research can reveal the hidden histories and lost identities of the city of Murmansk. The project aims to enable current and future generations of citizens to re-imagine and redefine the city and articulate their personal identity through digital arts. Murmansk Prospekt unfolds through three research labs stimulating knowledge exchange between emerging Dutch and Russian artists and thinkers, and results in commissioned collaborative works, public presentations in Murmansk ([Inversia Festival](https://inversiafest.com/)) and Amsterdam (Sonic Acts), and an online platform.\
[murmanskprospekt.net](murmanskprospekt.net)  

**Sergey Kostyrko** (RU) is a sound artist with a focus on science and bio art projects, as well as a musician working in the field of improvisational and noise music. Besides this, he is an associate professor at St. Petersburg State University. He has a background in the development of analytical and computational methods for solving boundary value problems in elasticity theory. His research area covers the different aspects of mechanics and thermodynamics of thin film materials.\
[Bandcamp](https://sergeykostyrko.bandcamp.com/)

Sergey Kostyrko

Settlers by Sergey Kostyrko out now

_Transients I/O_, the debut solo release from **Andreas Kühne**, captures a hidden city at the edge of the Earth. Based on field improvisations recorded from 2018–2020 in Murmansk (the largest city above the Arctic Circle) the two-part electro-acoustic album uses the sounds of objects across Murmansk to speculate on the identity of this remote city – and how its young inhabitants adjust to living there.  

For _Transients I/O_, Kühne recorded site-specific musical improvisations with objects in Murmansk that are visibly present in the city but not audible. A nuclear submarine, abandoned vehicles, decaying harbours, factories and bridges – all resonate and tell their own stories. The multiformat release uses these to present the Arctic city in two very different ways: rough-hewn, explosive textures on a four-track digital release, versus the yawning, slow billowing natural overtones of ‘Carrier’ Parts I and II on vinyl.  

[Order now from the Sonic Acts webshop](https://sonicacts.com/sashop/product/vinyl-digital-download-andreas-kuhne-transients-i-o/)


>“Recording field improvisations in a public space often creates intimate moments, as you are not only exposing the sounds of urban objects but also positioning yourself in relation to their place and to other users of that place. It constantly forces you to reflect on what you’re doing and on how you will give back to that moment”

_Transients I/O is being released [alongside the forthcoming Settlers by Sergey Kostyrko](https://sonicacts-frontend.vercel.app/news/murmansk-prospekt-releases). Both releases were developed as part of Murmansk Prospekt, and commissioned by Sonic Acts (NL) and Fridaymilk (RU)_ 

**Murmansk Prospekt** is a collaboration between Sonic Acts and [Fridaymilk](http://www.fridaymilk.com/en/), exploring the ways that artistic and speculative research can reveal the hidden histories and lost identities of the city of Murmansk. The project aims to enable current and future generations of citizens to re-imagine and redefine the city and articulate their personal identity through digital arts. Murmansk Prospekt unfolds through three research labs stimulating knowledge exchange between emerging Dutch and Russian artists and thinkers, and results in commissioned collaborative works, public presentations in Murmansk ([Inversia Festival](https://inversiafest.com/)) and Amsterdam (Sonic Acts), and an online platform.\
[murmanskprospekt.net](murmanskprospekt.net)   

**Andreas Kühne** (NL) is an Amsterdam-based composer, sound artist, and drummer. He creates electroacoustic music, collaborative audio-visual performances, and interactive installations – often using field recordings. This allows him to explore the sonic qualities of inert objects through site-specific musical improvisation. His work has been presented at Inversia Festival, Sonic Acts Festival, and in Norway, Slovakia, Belgium and Brighton, UK. His many projects and collaborations include playing with Lisa and the F.I.X., Anne la Berge, Wilbert de Joode, Raphael Vanoli, Oene van Geel, Jasper Stadhouders, Bram Stadhouders, Ellen ten Damme and many others.\
[andreaskune.net](andreaskune.net)

Andreas Kühne performing at Inversia Festival 2022

Transients I/O by Andreas Kühne out now

Sonic Acts and Inversia will release two records as part of Murmansk Prospekt, an ongoing artistic research project to reveal the hidden histories and lost identities of Murmansk: the largest city above the Arctic Circle. _Transients I/O_ by **Andreas Kühne** and _Settlers_ by **Sergey Kostyrko** both result from extensive research trips and field recordings in the region. Though each very different sonically and conceptually, together they present a vivid, complex portrait of a region in flux, and a city at the end of the earth.  

_Settlers_, by Sergey Kostyrko (RU) from nearby Nikel, presents two very different windows into the region. Sounds of Migration on Side B turns data flows into sound with an automated noise composition that viscerally expresses the region’s dramatic decline in population. Side A, Murmansk Soundscape, presents an uninterrupted field recording marked by the sounds of trains, ships, harbour cranes and howling wind: a soundscape capturing the beating infrastructural heart of a city still buzzing with insistent activity, even as it slowly drains away.  

For _Transients I/O_, Andreas Kühne (NL) recorded site-specific musical improvisations with objects that are visibly present in the city but not audible. A nuclear submarine, abandoned vehicles, decaying harbours, factories and bridges – all resonate and tell their own stories. And the multiformat release expresses these in two very different ways: rough-hewn, explosive textures on a four-track digital release, versus the yawning, slow billowing natural overtones of ‘Carrier’ Parts I and II on vinyl. Listened to in any order, this cycle takes unexpected turns, presenting listeners with a vivid tour through a dynamic, distant landscape.  

**Transients I/O is released on 18 February**\
→ [Pre-order now](https://sonicacts.com/sashop/product/vinyl-digital-download-andreas-kuhne-transients-i-o/)

**Settlers is released on 25 February**\
→ [Pre-order now](https://sonicacts.com/sashop/product/pre-order-vinyl-sergey-kostyrko-settlers/)  

Press kits & preview available on request: [press@sonicacts.com](mailto:press@sonicacts.com) 

_Both releases were developed as part of Murmansk Prospekt, and commissioned by Sonic Acts (NL) and Fridaymilk (RU)_ 

Murmansk Prospekt is a collaboration between Sonic Acts and [Fridaymilk](http://www.fridaymilk.com/en/), exploring the ways that artistic and speculative research can reveal the hidden histories and lost identities of the city of Murmansk. The project aims to enable current and future generations of citizens to re-imagine and redefine the city and articulate their personal identity through digital arts. Murmansk Prospekt unfolds through three research labs stimulating knowledge exchange between emerging Dutch and Russian artists and thinkers, and results in commissioned collaborative works, public presentations in Murmansk ([Inversia Festival](https://inversiafest.com/)) and Amsterdam (Sonic Acts), and an online platform.  

**Andreas Kühne** (NL) is an Amsterdam-based composer, sound artist, and drummer. He creates electroacoustic music, collaborative audio-visual performances, and interactive installations – often using field recordings. This allows him to explore the sonic qualities of inert objects through site-specific musical improvisation. His work has been presented at Inversia Festival, Sonic Acts Festival, and in Norway, Slovakia, Belgium and Brighton, UK. His many projects and collaborations include playing with Lisa and the F.I.X., Anne la Berge, Wilbert de Joode, Raphael Vanoli, Oene van Geel, Jasper Stadhouders, Bram Stadhouders, Ellen ten Damme and many others.\
[Bandcamp](https://andreaskuhne.bandcamp.com/)  

**Sergey Kostyrko** (RU) is a sound artist with a focus on science and bio art projects, as well as a musician working in the field of improvisational and noise music. Besides this, he is an associate professor at St. Petersburg State University. He has a background in the development of analytical and computational methods for solving boundary value problems in elasticity theory. His research area covers the different aspects of mechanics and thermodynamics of thin film materials.\
[Bandcamp](https://sergeykostyrko.bandcamp.com/)

Transients I/O

Murmansk Prospekt double record release in collaboration with Inversia Festival

Titled never odd or even, a new web-based work from OVEREXPOSED residents MELT (**Loren Britton** & **Isabel Paehr**) invites visitors to time travel.  

Unfolding over several months, the work begins now with a "wobbly plane" for non-normative ways of experiencing, theorising, materialising and subverting being in time. Presented as an (optional) game, this "Map" allows site visitors to move between various audio and textual ruminations on conceptions of past, present and future. In another fold, under the tab "Ice", the video work _Temporal Drift_ relays experiences of pain, mutual support and ephemerality through the mediums of bodily heat and melting ice.  

MELT encourage visitors on _never odd or even_ to go a their own pace and embrace non-linearity: navigating in loops and circles, playing along with palindromes, discontinuities or slowness.  

Look out for a feature on MELT in the next print issue of _[Ecoes magazine](https://sonicacts.com/sashop/)_ and watch this space for further developments.  

[VISIT NEVER ODD OR EVEN](https://overexposed.sonicacts.com/neveroddoreven)

## About MELT

MELT (Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr) are arts-design researchers who work together on games, technology and critical pedagogy. Investigating the political and material conditions of technological infrastructures, they re-distribute agency through methods of queer play, unlearning and leaking. They were one of six artists and researchers in the first round of OVEREXPOSED, a residency programme from Sonic Acts.  

[meltionary.com](http://meltionary.com/)\
[Melt on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/meltionary/)  

## About OVEREXPOSED

OVEREXPOSED is a residency programme from Sonic Acts investigating pollution and its effects on everything living and non-living, through which we aim to create awareness about pollution both in local surroundings and on a planetary scale. Using artistic research as an exploration of the connections between aesthetics, historical materiality and politics, the programme intends to stimulate thought and imagination about necessary steps – both locally and globally – and of course, direct action. The outcomes of the research will be presented in a variety of formats, including text publications, visual journals, and performative or discursive presentations.

never odd or even by MELT

Unfortunately, reality has caught up with us much more quickly than anticipated for Sonic Acts Festival 2022. Despite our hopes and plans to adapt the festival programme to the evolving situation, the current government restrictions make this impossible for the coming period. We have therefore decided to cancel the festival in February.  

In the new year we will be working on rescheduling festival activities to a later date, while establishing new ways to showcase artists and their work. Until then, we are happy to share with you below some of the artistic developments that have materialised over the past year and that will continue into the next.   

For now, we wish you a healthy and brighter 2022.   

Stay safe and take care!

25502950.png

Sonic Acts Festival 2022 in February Cancelled

Ecoes is a periodic magazine from Sonic Acts about art in the age of pollution. The magazine continues Sonic Acts’ emphasis on artists and thinkers that propose alternatives to the anthropocentric view that sees Earth and the non-human world as an endless resource.  

[Our first issue](https://sonicacts.com/sashop/product/ecoes/) presented artistic perspectives on mining, microplastics and more. Now, this second issue features work investigating the 'zombie clothes' of Senegalese salt harvesters; the 'oozy' words of conceptual, critical writing; the visual reaction signals of plants in 'botanical torture chambers'; the long ecological and political histories of the Mesopotamian Marshes; the sonification of 'exquisite corpses' during lockdown; and the contested visualisations of worlds, from colonial ocean mapping to Mars probes.  

Featured artists and thinkers include **Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Victoria Douka-Doukopoulou, Lisa van Casand, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, Devin Hentz, Ameneh Solati, Russell Haswell and Hugo Esquinca, Angeliki Diakrousi,** and **Yara Said**.  

Both issues of Ecoes are available to [order now from the Sonic Acts webshop](https://sonicacts.com/sashop/product/ecoes2/).

Ecoes Issue #02

Ecoes Issue #2 out now

Writer, theorist and Sonic Acts artist-in-residence **Maryam Monalisa Gharavi** deals with the paradoxes of our interactions with matter and immateriality, the seen and unseen, underlying everyday life and its common preconceptions. Addressing these concerns, **Gharavi reflects on her work in the latest episode of the OVEREXPOSED podcast, as well as in a roundtable conversation on oil and data** that took place during Exhaust, an online event earlier this year.  

In the [OVEREXPOSED podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/overexposed/id1567822680), presented and produced in collaboration with [Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee](https://www.jajajaneeneenee.com/about/), participants of the residency programme OVEREXPOSED are invited to discuss artefacts that have moved their practice in a lasting way. With the second round of this residency now in progress, we present a further podcast from one the programme’s first six residents.   

This [latest episode](https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/extractive-logic-with-maryam-monalisa-gharavi/id1567822680?i=1000542997810) sees resident Maryam Monalisa Gharavi recalling the impact of watching Luis Buñuel’s 1950 film Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones, known in the United States as The Young and the Damned). In particular, she describes how a particular moment from the film – in which a blind man and a chicken stare at one another – struck her as a profound reminder of the limits of knowledge and visuality. This opens up a deeper discussion about issues central to her work, in an evocative reflection on extraction, exhaustion, covered faces, transparency, oil and data.

→ The Overexposed Podcast can be found on all major podcast platforms.  

Gharavi was also the co-producer of [Exhaust](https://sonicacts.com/portal/sonic-acts-presents-exhaust--an-online-roundtable-discussion-on-oil-and-data), an online roundtable discussion that took place on 27 February 2021, featuring political and environmental anthropologist Omolade Adunbi, media artist and programmer Ryan Kuo, artist and geographer Helen Pritchard and interdisciplinary researcher Andrea Sempértegui, with moderation by critic, curator and art historian Murtaza Vali. Taking as its starting point the phrase ‘data is the new oil’ – coined in 2006 by British mathematician (and customer loyalty card inventor) Clive Humby – Exhaust drew on the insights of eminent academic thinkers and influential practitioners to speculate, critique and make visible the cultural geography of oil and data. 

→ A recording of the discussion is now available, with captions, on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOt0sGccfLogAmEJyOxRINQ) and [Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/sonicacts), where you can also find many other conversations, performances and works from OVEREXPOSED residents and other Sonic Acts participants.

# About OVEREXPOSED

OVEREXPOSED is a residency programme from Sonic Acts investigating pollution and its effects on everything living and non-living, through which we aim to create awareness about pollution both in local surroundings and on a planetary scale. Using artistic research as an exploration of the connections between aesthetics, historical materiality and politics, the programme intends to stimulate thought and imagination about necessary steps – both locally and globally – and of course, direct action. The outcomes of the research will be presented in a variety of formats, including text publications, visual journals, and performative or discursive presentations.

Overexposed Podcast & Exhaust featuring Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

Delve into Sonic Acts’ online archive of events, projects and commissions with us as we begin to reflect on 2021. Soil Samples and Nuclear Unknowns are two round table discussions that took place online earlier this year under the banner of Night Air – an event series that aims to make pollution visible. Video recordings of both discussions are now available to watch on our [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOt0sGccfLogAmEJyOxRINQ) and [Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/sonicacts) channels.  

Soil Samples gathered artists and researchers on Saturday 24 April for an evening of performances, presentations and discussions that addressed the topic of soil and its geopolitical, colonial, and bodily entanglements. The panel was made up of sound artist **Felicity Mangan**, researcher and 'tiny miner' **Martin Howse**, biogeochemist and critical ecologist **Kunal Palawat** working in tandem with visual artist **Dorsey Kaufmann**.

On Tuesday 22 June, Nuclear Unknowns took us down the complex path of radioactive pollution, exploring the subject’s ecological, artistic and geopolitical tangles. Moderated by art historian and curator Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, artistic researcher Agnes Vilette and curator Jason Waite discussed different strategies to grapple with nuclear energy’s uneven and calamitous aftermath.

Both events were transmitted online from Rotterdam, with participants and the audience joining from various locations worldwide.

→ Find out more about each event’s programme via [Soil Samples](https://sonicacts-frontend.vercel.app/discover/sonic-acts-presents-night-air-soil-samples) & [Nuclear Unknowns](https://sonicacts-frontend.vercel.app/discover/night-air-series-continues-with-nuclear-unknown-1).  

**NIGHT AIR**\
Night Air is a series of event that aims to make pollution visible by bringing forth the various side-effects of modernity: from colonial exploitation of people and resources to perpetual inequalities brought about by the destruction of the environment and common land – in other words, destructive capitalist practices that shape both our environment and human-nonhuman relations.  

**Night air is a myth with its origins in miasma theory (from the Greek for ‘pollution’). The theory held that smelly air from decaying organic matter caused illness. The smell would intensify and worsen by night, so night air became synonymous with poisonous and noxious vapours that could even cause pandemics such as cholera or plague. Only with developments in medicine and various scientific endeavours around the London cholera epidemic in the mid-1800s, did germs replace the ‘unhealthy fog’ as the culprit for diseases. And now, even though the idea has been abandoned, night air still echoes in words such as malaria (‘bad air’ in Italian), which actually connects air-borne poison with flying pests such as the disease-carrying mosquitoes.  

_Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission_

25502896.png

Catch up on the first season of Night Air

Shock Waves, a gathering that marked a new season of events under the banner of Night Air*, took place at OT301 in Amsterdam on Friday 5 November. Over the course of the evening, speakers and artists came together with the audience to consider the materiality of sound as a powerful means of resistance and control. The event featured talks by **Elena Cohen**, **María Edurne Zuazu** and **Yann Leguay**, DJ sets and performances from **Noise Diva** and **whiterose**, the installation **N/pantla by Paula Montecinos & Pedro Matias**, plus screenings of the **films** _Between the Bullet and the Hole and Preemptive Listening (Part 1: The Fork in the Road)_ by **Aura Satz**.  

As we take a moment to look back on Shock Waves, we would like to address a warm thank you to those who joined and participated.  

→ Watch our recap video of the event on [YouTube](https://youtu.be/IC-FCtVyqG0) or [Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/646444265):


→ Browse through our selection of photography on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/media/set?vanity=SonicActs&set=a.10158634122797379) or [Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/sonicacts/albums/72157720134152316):

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. **Elena Cohen**’s work as an attorney and professor specialised in repressive police practices offered case studies of how these are deployed in protest, detention, and warfare, causing a range of harm from disorientation and psychological distress to permanent internal damage. As **María Edurne Zuazu** spoke about in her lecture and wrote in _Loud but Non-lethal: Acoustic Stagings and State-Sponsored Violence_, such instruments rely on high-intensity and focused sound to suppress individuals by impairing their auditory systems. **Yann Leguay**’s performative lecture spoke to the dematerialisation of sound and the evolving effects of interfaces, featuring an electrical arc produced by a plasma speaker so powerful that it emanates magnetic disturbance. The two films by **Aura Satz** approached sonic obedience and disobedience through the trope of the siren and investigate ballistics as a field of study in relation to the role of women in early computing.  

If the energy of sound can be harnessed to cause harm and stifle dissent, it also constitutes a creative field for confrontation and resistance. **Paula Montecinos** and **Pedro Matias**’ installation N/pantla presented a corporeal debordering of fractured sound – addressing how intimately tied gendered and racialised capitalism are to our communal sense of self-preservation, while performances and DJ sets by local artists **whiterose** and **Noise Diva** embodied dissonance and noisemaking on the dancefloor.  

→ More information about the event and participants can be found at [sonicacts.com/night-air-shock-waves](https://sonicacts-frontend.vercel.app/agenda/night-air-shock-waves). 

# NIGHT AIR
Night Air is a series of events that aims to make pollution visible by bringing forth the various side-effects of modernity: from colonial exploitation of people and resources to perpetual inequalities brought about by the destruction of the environment and common land – in other words, destructive capitalist practices that shape both our environment and human-nonhuman relations.  

**Night air is a myth with its origins in miasma theory (from the Greek for ‘pollution’). The theory held that smelly air from decaying organic matter caused illness. The smell would intensify and worsen by night, so night air became synonymous with poisonous and noxious vapours that could even cause pandemics such as cholera or plague. Only with developments in medicine and various scientific endeavours around the London cholera epidemic in the mid-1800s, did germs replace the ‘unhealthy fog’ as the culprit for diseases. And now, even though the idea has been abandoned, night air still echoes in words such as malaria (‘bad air’ in Italian), which actually connects air-borne poison with flying pests such as the disease-carrying mosquitoes.  

→ Stay informed about future events! Subscribe to the [Sonic Acts Newsletter](http://eepurl.com/tA1fj).

Night Air: Shock Waves

Looking back at Night Air: Shock Waves

Hugo Esquinca

Russell Haswell

Cadáver Exquisito Caleidoscópico en Cuatro Ejes is a new work by artists **Hugo Esquinca** and **Russell Haswell** and commissioned by Sonic Acts. The work incorporates the game of ‘exquisite corpse’ – a technique of collective assembly in which they took turns contributing to the piece after receiving only a portion of what the other had previously contributed.

Initially intended to be presented in a live multi-channel setting in the Spring of 2021, before its postponement as a result of Covid-19, Cadáver Exquisito is the second outcome of a unique collaborative approach the artists have taken through a series of virtual residencies.

Now reconfigured to binaural audio, _Cadáver Exquisito Caleidoscópico en Cuatro Ejes_ is available to download and experience in 3D stereo sound. The digital release is accompanied by a conversation between Esquinca and Haswell and philosopher and editor **Robin Mackay**, in which they discuss the development of the work amidst the contingency of the pandemic, and how elements of everyday life and current events came to permeate the auditory fragments they exchanged.

**→ [Free download Cadáver Exquisito Caleidoscópico en Cuatro Ejes (binaural)](https://we.tl/t-kaUeIQE8Au)**

binaural-audio.png

New binaural audio release by Hugo Esquinca & Russell Haswell

**Sonic Acts is proud to announce three artists and researchers for a new round of OVEREXPOSED home-based residencies.**  

OVEREXPOSED is the new residency programme from Sonic Acts, investigating pollution and its effects on everything living and nonliving. Following an inspiring first round of residencies earlier this year, we put out another Open Call and were delighted to receive almost 300 applications.  

After being impressed with the talent and thoughtfulness exhibited by many of the proposals, we are thrilled to have selected three candidates to welcome as our remote artists- and researchers-in-residence. Over the course of November 2021, they will each undertake a period of artistic research with the aim of sharing their unique perspectives on the ecological issues at the core of the OVEREXPOSED programme.  

The three selected artists and researchers are **Emilija Škarnulytė**, **Lucky Dragons**, and **pantea**.

# ABOUT THE RESIDENTS

**Emilija Škarnulytė** is an artist and filmmaker working between documentary and the imaginary. She makes films and immersive installations exploring deep time and invisible structures, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political. Her films can be found in IFA, Kadist Foundation and Centre Pompidou collections and have been screened at the Serpentine Gallery (UK), the Centre Pompidou (France) and at numerous film festivals including in Rotterdam, Busan, and Oberhausen. She received an undergraduate degree from the Brera Academy of Art in Milan and holds a master’s from the Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art. She is a founder of and currently co-directs Polar Film Lab, a collective for analogue film practice located in Tromsø, Norway and is a member of artist duo New Mineral Collective, recently commissioned by the inaugural Toronto Biennial.  

→ [Website](https://www.emilijaskarnulyte.com/about-1)

**Lucky Dragons** is an ongoing collaboration between artists Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck, researching forms of participation and dissent, purposefully working towards a better understanding of existing ecologies through performances, publications, recordings, and public art. Lucky Dragons have presented collaborative work in a wide variety of contexts, including REDCAT, LACMA, MOCA and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, The Kitchen in New York, the 54th Venice Biennale, Documenta 14, The Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial) and The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. The name “Lucky Dragons” is borrowed from the fishing vessel caught in fallout from American H-bomb tests in the mid-1950’s, an incident which sparked international outcry and gave birth to the worldwide anti-nuclear movement.  

→ [Website](https://luckydragons.org/)

**pantea** aka Pantea Armanfar is an artist from Iran working with different media to imagine and share new narratives of ecological connections. She has experience in performance arts, film, photography, and music. More recently, she is focused on developing a socially engaged practice by exploring possibilities brought about by sound and listening. She is passionate about the environment, plants, and wetlands. She has performed and exhibited works in Iran, the Netherlands, Belgium, India, Turkey, and Scotland. pantea’s work on the plant Sundew has been published as creative nonfiction in Plumwood Mountain Journal.  

→ [Website](https://pantearm.github.io/)

# ABOUT OVEREXPOSED

**OVEREXPOSED** aims to create awareness about pollution both in local surroundings and on a planetary scale. Using artistic research as an exploration of the connections between aesthetics, historical materiality and politics, the programme intends to stimulate thought and imagination about necessary steps – both locally and globally – and of course, direct action. The outcomes of the research will be presented in a variety of formats, including text publications, visual journals, and performative or discursive presentations.  

Each resident is financially supported in their work with €2.000 over the course of the one-month residency period.  

The residents were selected by Sonic Acts curators and team members Mirna Belina, Pim Sem Benjamin, Victoria Douka-Doukopoulou, Gideon Kiers, Margarita Osipian, Yessica Deira, Maud Seuntjens, Lucas van der Velden and Stefan Wharton.

Overexposed

Introducing the next OVEREXPOSED home-based residents

On Saturday 22 May 2021, Sonic Acts transmitted _Water Resistance_ under the banner of  Night Air – a series of events dedicated to making pollution visible. Curated by artistic research resident Ameneh Solati, _Water Resistance_ brings together ongoing stories about water bodies as sites contaminated by power relations. Its aims are to embed ecological struggles within the narratives of nation-building, development and modernisation.  

_Water Resistance_ is now available to watch in full on the Sonic Acts [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3Gw3gbkpnM) and [Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/588776026) channels.

_Water Resistance_ opened to introductory words from the evening’s moderator, **Moad Musbahi**, whose film _Turbulant Flow_ was screened on repeat in parallel to the event. **Ameneh Solati** was then the first to dive in, taking the audience to the marshlands of Iraq, rereading the ecosystem’s unique history. During her talk, she revealed an alternative narrative of people’s resistance to subjugation, offering a new framework to address projects that continue to impact the marshlands today. In turn, **Merve Bedir** focused her talk on Maritsa (Evros/Meriç), a river that holds the national border among Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey; as well as part of the European Union border/Fortress Europe. Maritsa, we were shown, is a site of claimed sovereignties, infrastructural interventions, population control, and Anthropocene discourse. **Menna Agha** followed with a presentation in storytelling form, conveying the rupture between Nubians and their river, offering insight into environmental racism, dispossession and erasure, while asking questions about what water means to a Nile-based culture.  

For detailed programme information, visit the _Night Air_ archive at live.sonicacts.com.

# PARTICIPANTS

**Ameneh Solati** is a Rotterdam-based architectural designer, researcher and editor. Her practice engages with interdisciplinary methods in exploring forms of resistance within often overlooked spaces. She completed her MA degree in architecture in 2017 at the Royal College of Art in London. She is an editor and organiser at Failed Architecture and has previously worked with Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and various architectural practices in Amsterdam and London.  

**Merve Bedir** is an architect based in Hong Kong/Shenzhen. Her ongoing research examines infrastructures of hospitality and mobility. Merve Bedir is an adjunct assistant professor in Hong Kong University Department of Architecture, Division of Landscape Architecture, and a founding partner of Land and Civilization Compositions. Merve Bedir holds a PhD from the Architectural Engineering Department at the Delft University of Technology, and a B. Arch. from Middle East Technical University in Ankara.  

**Menna Agha** is an architect and researcher. She is a 2019/2020 Spatial Justice fellow and was visiting assistant professor at the University of Oregon. Currently, she is coordinating a spatial justice agenda at the Flemish Architecture Institute. Menna holds a PhD from the University of Antwerp and an MA from Köln international school of design. She is a third-generation displaced Egyptian Nubian which ushers her research interests in race, gender, space and territory.  

**Moad Musbahi** is an artist and curator who works between London and Tripoli. He utilises exhibition-making, video installation and writing to investigate migration as a method for cultural production and political expression. Through researching the movement of stories, people and sound, he focuses on the social practices and forms of knowledge that displacement engenders. His works has been presented at the Architectural Association, Jameel Art Center and Beirut Art Center among others. He is a recipient of the Sharjah Art Foundation’s Production Programme (2020) and currently a resident at Gasworks, London (2021).  

# NIGHT AIR

_Water Resistance_ was organised under the banner of _Night Air_ – a series of online transmissions from Sonic Acts, aims to make pollution visible by bringing forth the various side-effects of modernity: from colonial exploitation of people and resources to perpetual inequalities brought about by the destruction of the environment and common land – in other words, destructive capitalist practices that shape both our environment and human-nonhuman relations.

Water Resistance 

Water Resistance now available to watch online

**Maryam Monalisa Gharavi** is an artist, poet, and theorist whose work deals with the paradoxes of our interactions with matter and immateriality, the seen and unseen, underlying everyday life and its common preconceptions. As one of six artists and researchers particicpating in OVEREXPOSED, a Sonic Acts programme looking to create awareness about pollution, Monalisa delves deep into what she sees as ‘twin’ commodities: oil and data.

Thinking carefully about aesthetic and political values means focusing on discourse and tracing the genealogies of what may otherwise be taken for granted. Monalisa’s work involves challenging the assumption that data is an infinite and interactive ressource, and treating it instead through the lense of an extractive logic and economy – just like oil, which depends intensly on human labour and behaviours. For her remote residency, Brooklyn-based Monalisa takes up “exhaust” as a term both signifying depletion and born out of an age of imperialism and mass industrialisation.  

Monalisa tells us that behind her artistic practice is the idea that “a work of art must betray its maker”. She elaborates further, “you start with your curiosity and enact what you want to do, but that the work needs to exceed your expectations and exist without you.” Along with a variety of written and editorial work, her creation includes ‘live film’, a form she describes as a cross between moving picture and live performance.

Monalisa participated in the Sonic Acts 2017 festival _The Noise of Being_, where her [lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGihvChXzQM) _Face/Less: Human, Inhuman_, Abhuman showcased research and collected fragments about the face as a politically (think: surveillance) and aesthetically charged organ.  

**Read more about Maryam Monalisa Gharavi’s work in the first issue of _[Ecoes](https://sonicacts.com/sashop/product/ecoes/)_ magazine, available at the Sonic Acts webshop.**

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

Meet Artist in Residence Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

For almost three decades, Sonic Acts has sought to celebrate new developments in electronic and digital artforms. Taking place throughout October, Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 is staged across various locations, interweaving exhibition openings, performances and lectures. These will be accompanied by in/outdoor sound installations, artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more events yet to be announced.

→ Purchase your Early Bird passes via [Eventbrite](https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sonic-acts-biennial-2022-tickets-376107897847)

The biennial international festival has gained prominence since 1994 as an intensive art, theory and technology gathering that is motivated by changes in the ecological, political, and social landscapes.  Sonic Acts is back in full force this year, stretching beyond its standard format. Already a leading platform for international projects, research and the commissioning and co-production of new artworks, this edition reaffirms its dedication to supporting artists in ever-changing circumstances. Through artistic investigations and research, the organisation advances experimentation and provides a podium for dynamic perspectives, which can in turn be tools for discovery, growth, development, and emancipation.

This year’s edition of Sonic Acts’ biennial emphasises collaborative knowledge creation, as well as experimental sound and moving image that attunes and responds to ecological thinking. Through thought-provoking interventions, the biennial asks how we can care, collectively and despite exhaustion of energies, for what we cannot see or understand. The three weeks around which the biennial revolves provide a slow immersion into the environmental humanities and contemporary art practices responding to the urgency of pollution.

one sun after another, taking place from **30 September to 23 October**, expands the long-term Sonic Acts research trajectory on the implications and origins of the climate crisis, and focuses on the irrevocable, intertwined nature of pollution and time. 

Unfolding at three locations in Amsterdam – **W139, Zone2Source** in Amstelpark, and **Het HEM** in Zaandam – the exhibition moves across ecological and temporal scales.

With works by **Andrea Galano Toro; Cesar Majorana; Danny Osborne, Patrick Thompson, Alexa Hatanaka, Sarah McNair-Landry, Eric McNair-Landry, Erik Boomer and Raven Chacon; Félix Blume; John Grzinich; Julian Charrière; Leanne Wijnsma; Louis Braddock Clarke and Zuzanna Zgierska; Lucky Dragons (Sarah Rara, Luke Fischbeck); Maryam Monalisa Gharavi and Sam Lavigne; MELT (Isabel Paehr, Ren Loren Britton); Seline Buttner; Tomoko Sauvage.**

→ Read more about the [programme](https://www.sonicacts.com/agenda/one-sun-after-another)


During the second weekend of Sonic Acts Biennial 2022, **7–9 October**, Sonic Acts presents an extensive sound art programme at **Het Hem** and other venues across Amsterdam. Het Hem will host a radical diffusion of sound in space: an iteration of INA GRM’s Acousmonium, built in collaboration with Sonic Acts for the 2022 Biennial. Comprising musical performances, audiovisual works, immersive installations, site-specific field explorations & workshops, and more to be announced, the programmed activities follow Sonic Acts’ long term focus on sonic ecologies and pollution.

More information about the artists and events will be revealed later this summer


→ Read more about the [programme](https://www.sonicacts.com/agenda/sound-art)


The Sonic Acts symposium convenes over the weekend of **15 and 16 October** with a series of talks and workshops on the interconnected ways that pollution affects all things living and nonliving. This speculative series is led by international artists and thinkers at Likeminds in Amsterdam, along with an evening performance programme taking place there and at **Singelkerk**. _Leaving Traces_ asks how we can care, collectively, for others amidst toxicities that so often evade human perception.
 
Leading on from the discursive programme, Sonic Acts is honoured to present a newly commissioned chapter of Aura Satz's feature film _Preemptive Listening_, made in collaboration with sound artist BJ Nilsen. The symposium will close with evening performances by an exciting lineup of sound artists.

With talks and presentations from **Angeliki Balayannis; Aura Satz; Dani Admiss; Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou and Agnès Villette; Mary Maggic; MELT (Isabel Paehr, Loren Britton); Nerea Calvillo; Sasha Engelmann and Sophie Dyer.** 
More names to be announced soon


→ Read more about the [programme](https://www.sonicacts.com/agenda/leaving-traces)


→ Sign up to our [Newsletter](https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sonic-acts-biennial-2022-tickets-376107897847)

→ Purchase your Early Bird passes via [Eventbrite](https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sonic-acts-biennial-2022-tickets-376107897847)

SA-backgrounds-V01.jpg

Sonic Acts Biennal

one sun after another, taking place from 30 September to 23 October, expands the long-term Sonic Acts research focus on the implications of the climate crisis, tracing the inextricable nature of pollution and time.

Unfolding at three locations in Amsterdam – **W139**, **Zone2Source** in Amstelpark, and **Het HEM** in Zaandam – the exhibition and its events move across ecological and temporal scales.

Taking its name from a line in Etel Adnan’s powerful collection of poetry _The Arab Apocalypse_ (1989), the biennial exhibition gestures toward the passing of time, but also carries traces of Bhagavad Gita, referenced by Robert Oppenheimer after witnessing the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one. I am become Death, The Shatterer of Worlds.’ Drawing upon this sublime, all-subsuming vision, one sun after another attends to slow, accumulative violence as it makes its imprint on futures yet to come. Touching on deep, real, geological time, the programme embraces nonlinearity, fluctuation and porousness, making space for leaks. Permeable to hope, the figure of the ever-dawning sun glows without burning, permeating warmth, fueling imagination and progating life.

Contemplating multiple incarnations of time, one sun after another listens to an immersive aerial choir of bees, follows a microbe embedded within lithium travelling from a Chilean mine to a digital device, and plunges into deep time through lead-encased nuclear coconuts from the Bikini Atoll. Artistic research traces the lineages of exhaust produced by oil and other extractive economies, while in other places it speculates over Greenland’s mineral deposits, now made accessible by melting ice. In the Canadian Arctic, visual narratives on monumental ice walls come and go with tidal movements, soundtracked by a cacophony of environmental field recordings. Against the din, visitors are welcome to a joyful meditation about presence, sensing and bending time, before drifting downstream, where the exhibition stretches time even further. Diving under performative and installative artworks explore toxic cycles of water and stretch inner time with hybrid instruments and sub-aquatic amplification.

With works by 

**Andrea Galano Toro** • **Cesar Majorana** • **Danny Osborne**, **Patrick Thompson**, **Alexa Hatanaka**, **Sarah McNair-Landry**, **Eric McNair-Landry**, **Erik Boomer** and **Raven Chacon** • **Félix Blume** • **John Grzinich** • **Julian Charrière** • **Leanne Wijnsma** • **Louis Braddock Clarke** and **Zuzanna Zgierska** • **Lucky Dragons** (**Sarah Rara**, **Luke Fischbeck**) • **Maryam Monalisa Gharavi** and **Sam Lavigne** • **MELT** (**Isabel Paehr**, **Ren Loren Britton**) • **Seline Buttner** • **Tomoko Sauvage**

and more artists and events to be announced.


SA-backgrounds-V012.jpg

one sun after another

During the second weekend of its 2022 biennial, from 7 to 9 October, Sonic Acts presents an extensive sound art programme at **Het Hem** and other venues in Amsterdam.

The performances, commissioned artworks, installations, field explorations and workshops mix together sediments of critical thinking, music, new media and technology. The result is a vibrant, immersive programme expressing Sonic Acts’ long term artistic research on sonic ecologies and pollution.


Situated in the middle of an industrial zone, flanked by a body of water and forest, the former state munition factory of Het HEM hosts a radical diffusion of sound in space: an iteration of INA GRM’s Acousmonium, built in collaboration with Sonic Acts for this biennial. The programme invites the audience to tune into Het Hem’s terrain, infrastructure and acoustic environment. Here sound exists as a multiplicity of active verbs – soundings and reverberations – carrying with them experiences to deposit across creative, scientific and technological fields.

More information about the artists and events will be revealed later this summer.


SA-backgrounds-V014.jpg

Sound Art

The Sonic Acts symposium convenes over the weekend of 15 and 16 October with a series of talks, presentations and workshops by international artists and thinkers at Likeminds in Amsterdam, along with an evening performance programme taking place there and at Singelkerk. 

Embracing the words of artist Mary Maggic, who states that ‘toxicity is never consensual’, Leaving Traces opens a forum in which to feel out and become attentive to pollution’s harmful touch. Toxicity takes many forms, from the slow, cumulative violence of encroaching seas washing over old wastelands, to toxic spools coursing through waterways and bloodstreams, lacerating living cells on the way. Weathering erodes distinctions, undoes boundaries, with the severity of harm only coming to light in and after the storm. These events are neither singular, finite, nor spectacular, but instead often enact damage soundlessly, over timescales and media that escape human perception. In the midst of endless emergency, in a cacophony of crises, how do we listen for and tune into non normative experiences? How do we activate alarm and sound out our response-ability? 

Focusing on an extractive relationship to the Earth, participants will speculate on the interconnections of technologies, capital, pollution-making and climate collapse, which affects all things living and nonliving. Here the act of ‘leaving traces’ becomes as much about the material traces of toxicity as it is about art’s possibility to reach outside of its own echo chamber in order to become an active, disruptive force. If pollution is about leaving traces, so is the act of making them visible.
 
Leading on from the discursive programme, Sonic Acts is honoured to present a newly commissioned chapter of Aura Satz's feature film Preemptive Listening, made in collaboration with sound artist BJ Nilsen. The symposium will close with evening performances by an exciting lineup of sound artists.

With talks and presentations from 

**Angeliki Balayannis** • **Aura Satz** • **Dani Admiss** • **Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou** and **Agnès Villette** • **Mary Maggic** • **MELT** (**Isabel Paehr**, **Loren Britton**) • **Nerea Calvillo** • **Sasha Engelmann** and **Sophie Dyer**

and others to be announced soon.


SA-backgrounds-V013.jpg

Leaving Traces

By Sasha Engelmann and Sophie Dyer \
Illustrations by Golrokh Nafisi

>The following essay comes from the third issue of Ecoes, a periodic magazine from Sonic Acts about art in the age of pollution. Read this and much more in print [by ordering a copy from our webshop.](https://shop.sonicacts.com/product/ecoes3/)

# **Oracle, 2035**
The day the United States weather satellite, NOAA-2, was launched, a cow on a farm near Trujillo, Venezuela, was struck and killed by a meteorite. The United States government had hurled a metal object into space and the cosmos had hit back, causing the only recorded death of an animal by a celestial body.

Since the launch of NOAA-2 on 15th October 1972, its namesake, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has thrust 45 more satellites into Earth’s orbit. While meteorites have continued to rain down on earth, so have snow, ice, and water, violent enough to wash away whole herds of cows, farms and even cities. The Sun’s rays and the cinders of wildfires have beaten down, too. This is the climate in which the Feminist Antifascist Weather Front (FAWF) was formed, with NOAA-2 as its unlikely oracle. 

In 1972, NOAA-2 was the first satellite to continuously transmit cloud cover data. In its first weeks, the satellite captured the thermal radiation of tornado clouds as they uncoiled over the former United Kingdom after three summer months without rainfall. The country renamed its hastily appointed Minister for Drought, the Minister for Rain. NOAA-2 knew before they did, before we did. The satellite’s planned mission was two years. Yet more than half a century later, it is still operational, feeding the FAWF’s meshwork of ground stations. Only now, we have learned how to receive NOAA-2’s signals: to understand a little about the cloud systems that swirl like tea leaves in a fortune teller’s cup.

Today, FAWF’s ground station meshwork is a response to the heavy weather. By weather we do not only mean the snow, the ice, the rains, the fire and dust; we also mean the political climate that threatens the most vulnerable among us, including the animals, plants and ecosystems. With the help of NOAA-2, we sense the Earth to imagine other weather worlds, and to outlast this one. The worlds we conjure are those of solidarity, knowledge sharing, creativity and biodiversity. Feminism has always been about envisioning futures to edge the parameters of reality towards what the world could and should be. FAWF found a medium in NOAA-2.

# **Static, 2032**
The Groundnut seedlings bowed in the dry wind, mirroring and multiplying Miel’s body as she bent down to weed. In the next row, Garlic and Oca stood shaded by lines of Maize, sheltered in turn by palms and the sombrero-like canopies of Walnut trees. The agroforestry farm had taken more than half a decade to establish. Now it was her main source of income and food. In the ever-stranger weather, agroforestry was less of a choice and more a necessity: resilient, compared to late nineteenth-century land management practices reliant on fertilisers, herbicides and mild conditions. Agroforestry offered Miel protection from the weather, and the equally volatile supply chains. Since The Storms began, it was impossible to tell what equipment or supplies would be available and when. 

Stood apart from the Walnuts was another tree, only its branches were made of metal and uniform in length, arranged in a star-like pattern. Reaching five metres into the air, it glowed faintly in the evening light. Cables twisted around its rusted base. Building the radio antenna here had been Miel’s first commitment in making this land, that had once been clear-cut, her home. She had found the sculptural design in an old ‘cookbook’ for DIY antennas. Miel had been impressed to read that the book’s author, Margaretta D’Arcy, was the founder of a feminist group called Radio Pirate Women in Galway, Ireland. D’Arcy had devised recipes for constructing antennas out of household objects such as coat hangers and rusty utensils to avoid buying equipment that would have brought Radio Pirate Women’s activities to the attention of the British Government. Learning about the Irish women’s resistance and technical skill had fuelled Miel’s desire to become a proficient radio operator. 

Dusk had turned to night, not that the sky really got dark anymore. Miel took an old laptop computer out of her backpack and plugged a dongle into one of its pores. Searching through the grass, she found the braided cable that emerged from the base of the antenna and attached it to the dongle. A few lines of code launched a piece of software from the early 2000s, and the radio spectrum began pouring down her screen like a waterfall. She turned the volume up and listened. The evening cicadas were now replaced by the radiophonic chirrups of one and two-hop ‘whistlers’ emanating from faraway electrical storms.

She frequency-shifted to check the local bands for news of recent disruptions to infrastructure, water rationing, or heavy weather. The familiar sound of a computer-generated voice, scripted by a news gathering network, rose above the static.

She relaxed only when the mechanical voice restarted its loop. There was nothing she needed to act on, Miel noted. The conditions were stable. This meant she had some time to explore. Switching modes, Miel tuned to 7 MHz. She loved this part of the spectrum. 7 MHz was one of the first bands allocated to amateur radio users in the early days of wireless communication. The radio waves at 7 MHz reached 42.857 metres from peak to peak. At sunset and sunrise, these waves could traverse continents and oceans, skipping between ground and sky. Sensitive to electromagnetic perturbations, they could also ride the ionised tails of meteors. Although amateur use of the band had waned, Miel nevertheless felt a second rush of anticipation as she scanned the spectrum. 

A book that Miel was reading about a radio operator in the Second World War described static as ‘the sound of thinking’. The author added, ‘not of any single person thinking, nor of a group thinking, collectively. It is bigger than that, wider – and more direct. It is like the sound of thought itself, its hum and rush.’ The statement made sense to her. When listening to static, Miel experienced a state of deep relaxation in which she did not stop thinking, her thoughts instead intermingling with the radio noise of human, geomagnetic and cosmic activity. The noise of being. Lulled by the ocean of static coming out of her laptop speakers, a burst of energy at 7.108 MHz startled her. The burst left a bright purple streak on the otherwise blue waterfall display. She zoomed in, selected the frequency and listened. For what felt like minutes, nothing happened. Then a voice cut through the white noise:

‘Is anyone out there? I must be alone.’

