SONIC ACTS Exhibition: THE NOISE OF BEING Arti et Amicitiae, 1—26 February 2017 Opening 1 February, 19:00-00:00 The Noise of Being exhibition speculates on the strange and anxious state of being human. Works by five international artists — Joey Holder, Justin Bennett, Kate Cooper, Pinar Yoldas and Zach Blas — function as portals into parallel realities, where the
audience is invited to decipher weird histories and eerie futures, defy systems of power and control through queerness, explore synthetic alien biologies, take refuge within the hyperreal, and imagine other possible species and impossible environments. What does it mean to be human? While navigating the meshes that grow ever more complex, how can we deal with the noise that surrounds us? Will the introduction of more or advanced technology
obscure our view, or help us to understand the world better? Because we are all entangled in a web of different encounters, can we strive for a world in which all (non)humans are equally (non)human? By envisioning fantastic and horrific narratives of an uncanny world with alternative modes of existence, the exhibition offers different strategies for understanding the noise of being. The exhibition opens on 1 February in Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam 2
and can be visited until the end of the Sonic Acts Festival, 26 February. The five emerging artists have made sitespecific and immersive installations that are commissioned by or restaged especially for Sonic Acts and present their work in a series of events consisting of guided tours, workshops and artist talks in the weeks preceding the festival and during the festival conference. The Noise of Being
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ARTISTS
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Joey Holder Justin Bennett Kate Cooper Pinar Yoldas Zach Blas
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JOEY HOLDER Ophiux 2016 London-based Joey Holder graduated from Kingston University in 2001 and completed an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2010. Working with scientific and technical experts she makes immersive, multimedia installations that explore the limits of the human and how we experience non-human, natural and technological forms. Combining elements of biology, nanotechnology and natural history with computer programme interfaces, screensavers and measuring devices, she reveals the impermanence and inter-changeability of these apparently contrasting and oppositional worlds: ‘everything is mutant and hybrid’. For her upcoming exhibition at Sonic Acts Festival — against the backdrop of the emergent field of computational biology and the Google Genomics project — she invented Ophiux, a speculative pharmaceutical company, and imagines its use of genetic sequencing equipment and biological machines to collect sample data from humans and other organisms. Holder explains: ‘It seems as if everything has become a branch 6
Joey Holder
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of computer science; even our own bodies are probed, imaged, modelled and mapped: redrawn as digital information’. Ophiux (2016) was originally commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, with funding from Arts Council England in 2016. The film was cocommissioned with Deptford X, London. With thanks to Dr Marco Galardini, Computational Biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge; Dr Katrin Linse, Senior Biodiversity Biologist at the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge; Alex Walker, Graphic Designer; and AJA, Sound Design. Joey Holder, Ophiux, 2016 Š Damian Griffiths
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JUSTIN BENNETT Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains 2017 Justin Bennett, based in The Hague, studied sculpture and electronic music and much of his work brings together spatial recordings of environmental sound with the resonances of buildings and materials in an exploration of the relations between sound and space. He often combines these recordings with spoken words to immerse the audience in a story or to subtly change their perception of a place. His work has been shown in public spaces as well as galleries, museums, and concert venues. Recent projects include an audio walk created from the Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi project at the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia for Dark Ecology, 2016; Blueprint, an animated film score for live improvised music, 2015; Hyperforum, an installation at Maxxi, Rome using 3D sound from public places, 2014; and Secret Garden, a sound work for mobile devices in Amstelpark, Amsterdam, in 2014. 10
Justin Bennett
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In his three-part audiovisual installation Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains (2017) we follow Viktor Koslovsky, a scientist still working at the otherwise abandoned Kola Superdeep Borehole, a geological research station ‘at the border of everything’ in northwestern Russia. Descending more than 12 kilometres, the borehole is the deepest man-made hole on Earth. Bennett tells of the history of this former Cold War project and discusses his current research, which he describes as ‘listening to the past in order to hear the future’. This work is commissioned by Sonic Acts & Dark Ecology.
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Justin Bennett
KATE COOPER We Need Sanctuary 2016 The sick, lazy computer-generated body performs: women cleaning and caring for each other, touching coded objects with a desire to form physical dialogues. Sanctuary sites are spaces of refusal that arise in the body; they are unreachable areas, unable to be penetrated by drugs. Can CG images create sheltered digital spaces, where images of bodies exist beyond our grasp, creating new relationships for physical bodies and networks they might occupy? Kate Cooper is interested in the potential of CG images and their presentation as autonomous entities with a logic of their own. She disconnects these images from their economic context by making body and object relate to each other in improbable situations. She explores the transfer of meaning between images, networks and our bodies and how they might relate to different forms of immaterial labour and women’s work. Can images move beyond representation, becoming autonomous entities with power and intent, which work to circumnavigate and withdraw labour? The Noise of Being
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Kate Cooper lives and works in London and Amsterdam. She is co-founder of Auto Italia, the London-based, artist-led initiative. She has an upcoming commission with the Public Art Fund, New York (2017) She won the BEN Prize for Emerging Talent, B3 Biennial of the Moving Images, Frankfurt (2015); and received the Schering Stiftung Art Award, Berlin (2014). Recent solo exhibitions include Piece Unique, Cologne, Germany (2016); Rigged, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014), and recent group exhibitions include Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Tent, Rotterdam; International Centre of Photography, New York (2016), Serralves Museum, Porto (2015).
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Kate Cooper
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PINAR YOLDAS The Kitty AI, Artificial Intelligence for Governance 2016 Designer Babies 2013-16 An infradisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher, Pinar Yoldas’s work spans subjects such as AI, genetics, and systems of power. She combines biological sciences and digital technologies, and presents the results as architectural installations, kinetic sculpture, sound, video, and drawings. Yoldas presents two works at Sonic Acts, The Kitty AI, Artificial Intelligence for Governance (2016) and Designer Babies (2013-16). Both are restaged in a unique set-up especially for Sonic Acts, including five new Designer Babies. It is the year 2039. An artificial intelligence with the affective capacity of a kitten who can love up to 3 million people at the same time, becomes a first non-human governor. While living inside the mobile devices of her citizens, she leads a politician-free zone, where she reflects on the effects of climate change and how this has caused the city to change. 16
Pinar Yoldas
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In searching for new ways of urban living, she encourages co-existence between different species. Designer Babies is a room-size installation that explores genetic modification and the future it could produce. A designer baby’s genetic makeup has been selected to eradicate defects, or ensure that a particular gene is present. The subject of genetic modification — which occurs on a wide scale in the food industry, for example, but less so in human beings — is ethically complicated and sparks both curiosity and fear: what used to be science fiction is now a possibility. Pinar Yoldas holds a PhD from Duke University, a Bachelors of Architecture from Middle East Technical University, a Master of Arts from Bilgi University, a Master of Science from Istanbul Technical University, and a MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her book, An Ecosystem of Excess, was published by ArgoBooks in 2014. Pinar is a 2016 FEAT Future Emerging Arts and Technologies Award recipient. Past shows at Roda Sten Konsthall (2016); Polyteknikum Museum, Moscow (2015); Transmediale, Berlin (2014); ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2015); and 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), to name a few. 18
Pinar Yoldas
ZACH BLAS Facial Weaponization Suite 2011-14 Face Cages 2013-16 Facial Weaponization Suite protests against biometric facial recognition — and the inequalities these technologies propagate — by making ‘collective masks’ in communitybased workshops that are modelled from the aggregated facial data of the participants, resulting in amorphous masks that cannot be detected by biometric facial recognition technologies. The masks are used for public interventions and performances. One mask, the Fag Face Mask, generated from the biometric facial data of many queer men’s faces, is a response to scientific studies that link determining sexual orientation through rapid facial recognition techniques. Another mask explores a tripartite conception of blackness, divided between biometric racism (the inability of biometric technologies to detect dark skin), the favouring of black in militant aesthetics, and black as that which informatically obfuscates. A third mask engages feminism’s relations to concealment The Noise of Being
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and imperceptibility, taking recent veil legislation in France as a troubling site that turns visibility into an oppressive logic of control. A fourth mask takes up biometrics’ deployment as a border security technology at the Mexico–US border and the resulting violence and nationalism it instigates. These masks intersect with social movements’ use of masking as an opaque tool of collective transformation that refuses dominant forms of political representation. Face Cages is a dramatisation of the abstract violence of the biometric diagram. In this installation and performance work, four queer artists (Micha Cárdenas, Elle Mehrmand, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Zach Blas), whose bodies and identities are particularly precarious to biometric scrutiny, generate biometric diagrams of their faces, which are then fabricated as threedimensional metal objects, evoking a material resonance with handcuffs, prison bars, and torture devices. The metal face cages are then worn in endurance performances for video. Once materialised as a physical object, the computational biometric diagram, a supposedly perfect measuring and accounting of the face, transforms into a cage that does not easily fit the human head, and is painful to The Noise of Being
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wear. These cages exaggerate and perform the irreconcilability of the biometric diagram with the materiality of the human face itself — and the violence that occurs when the two are forced to coincide. The exhibition at Sonic Acts features 3 of the 4 face cages combined in a new set-up together with Facial Weaponization Suite. Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice engages technics and minoritarian politics. Currently, he is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Blas has exhibited and lectured internationally at Whitechapel Gallery, London; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; ICA, London; e-flux, New York; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; New Museum, New York; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporåneo, Mexico City; and transmediale, Berlin. Blas holds a PhD in Literature from Duke University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.
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PRE-EVENTS Alongside the exhibition there are various other events connected to the festival including guided tours, artist talks, performances and workshops that take place at various locations in Amsterdam. WEDNESDAY 8 FEB 17:00-18:00 guided exhibition tour 19:00-22:00 Taste The Doom — whisky tasting and doom metal with performances at OT301 WEDNESDAY 15 FEB 19:00-20:00 guided exhibition tour 20:00-21:30 An Evening With Joey Holder — artist talk & interview by Nicky Assmann WEDNESDAY 22 FEB 19:00-20:00 guided exhibition tour Several of the artists (Zach Blas, Ernst Karel, Pinar Yoldas) will also lead workshops and masterclasses before and after the festival. For the full workshop programme, check out the website www.sonicacts.com The Noise of Being
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COMMISSIONED ON-SITE WORKS 1—26 FEB
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Jana Winderen at Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ Signe Lidén & Espen Sommer Eide at Water Tower Sint Jansklooster
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JANA WINDEREN Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone 2017 Jana Winderen studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London, with a background in mathematics, chemistry and fish ecology from the University of Oslo. She releases her audiovisual works on Touch. What we have come to call the ‘seasonal marginal’ ice zone in the Barents Sea came to the public’s attention because of a dispute in 2015. Politicians declared that since the ‘ice edge had moved itself’ north, it had opened up new possibilities for oil and gas exploitation. This, as well as the plans for shipping activity in the resulting North–East Passage served as an impetus for Jana Winderen to specifically research ‘the ice edge’. Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone (2017) is her latest instalment in a progression of works that reveal the sounds of underwater life, from the warm waters in the Caribbean to the cold and nourishing waters around Greenland, Norway and Iceland.
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Jana Winderen
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This work is commissioned by Sonic Acts and Dark Ecology and can be viewed from 1 till 26 February at Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ in Amsterdam (free of charge). This work was also supported by Art & Technology — Arts Council Norway, Fond for lyd og bilde, Tono stipendet, ARCEx R/V Herman Hanssen, University in Tromsø & Mamont foundation.
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Jana Winderen
SIGNE LIDÉN & ESPEN SOMMER EIDE Vertical Studies: Acoustic Shadows and Boundary Reflections 2016 In their new collaborative work, Vertical Studies: Acoustic Shadows and Boundary Reflections (2017), Signe Lidén and Espen Sommer invite participants to a 46-metre-high water tower in Sint Jansklooster. The tower has been re-imagined as a vertical field-lab where Lidén and Sommer discuss their ongoing research into connections between sound, history, wind and weather. To this end they have constructed a range of special instruments to record and playback sounds in the vertical dimension. The participants will experience live outdoor vertical studies and a vertical soundscape shaped by Eide and Lidén that ascends the tower’s spiral staircase.
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This work is a Sonic Acts and Dark Ecology commission and can be viewed during visitor’s hours on 4, 11, 18 and 25 February at the water tower of Sint Jansklooster (Overijssel). On 1 and 23 February Espen & Signe will do live performances of the work at this location. Tickets are available at www.sonicacts.com
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Signe Lidén & Espen Sommer Eide
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ABOUT SONIC ACTS Sonic Acts Festival is a biannual thematic event that focuses on developments in art, music, and science. The Noise of Being, the 17th edition of the festival, takes place in Amsterdam from 23 —26 February 2017.
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It includes an exhibition, conference, performances, film programme, workshops, masterclasses, and club nights at Paradiso, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Bimhuis, De Brakke Grond, OT301, Arti et Amicitiae and Water Tower Sint Jansklooster. Tickets are available at sonicacts.com
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INFORMATION Arti et Amicitiae Rokin 112 1012 LB Amsterdam www.arti.nl OPENING HOURS 1—26 February 2017 Tuesday — Sunday 12:00-18:00 Extended opening hours during the festival from 23 —26 Feb 10:00-20:00 ADMISSION € 3,00 Free admission for Sonic Acts Festival pass and day ticket holders, students and Arti et Amicitiae members.
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COLOPHON The Noise of Being is curated by Nicky Assmann, Mirna Belina, Gideon Kiers, Rosa Menkman, Lucas van der Velden and Juha van ‘t Zelfde. Produced by Eve Dullaart, Rick Everts, Sebastian Frisch, Erwin van ’t Hart, Mark den Hoed, Suze de Lang, Julia Nüsslein, Macha Rousakov, Merel Somhorst, Anne van Waveren and Annette Wolfsberger. Communication by Arie Altena, Bas van den Broeke, Fridaymilk, Pieter Kers, Mark Poysden, de Gebroeders van Leeuwen, Chee Yee Tang and Stefan Wharton. Design by The Rodina Printed by Zwaan Media All images courtesy of the artists A special thank you to Pierre Ballings, Marjo Boeijen, Bernadette Haverkort, Bart van der Heide, Mark Minkman, Joost Rekveld, Floortje Smehuijzen and Gerard Walhof. SONIC ACTS Weteringschans 6-8 1017 SG Amsterdam www.sonicacts.com info@sonicacts.com The Noise of Being is produced in association with Arti et Amicitiae, Paradiso, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, de Brakke Grond, Bimhuis, OT301 and Watertoren Sint Jansklooster. The Noise of Being is supported by Creative Industries Fund NL, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Mondriaan Fund, Fonds 21, VSBfonds, Performing Arts Fund NL, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, Paradiso, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, De Brakke Grond, Arti et Amicitiae, Bimhuis, OT301, Natuurmonumenten, Het Nieuwe Instituut, WG Theatertechniek, Indyvideo, Filmtechniek and Planemos.
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