Technologizing the »Ethnic« Sound
Emma Lo (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, DE)
What happens when an instrument is completely extracted from its native environment and cultural context? Recent digital tools separate, for the first time, the recorded sounds of traditional instruments from East and Southeast Asia from their performers and repertoires. Virtual instrument production companies have produced sample libraries of instruments like the Chinese sheng and guzheng, and Balinese gamelan. In Soniccouture’s gamelan plug-in, assembled from 8,000 recordings, producers can separate and recombine 30 different instruments, as well as retune to the Western heptatonic scale. While this product aurally preserves high levels of articulation and nuance, it disrupts essential elements of gamelan. By allowing the consumer to isolate individual instruments and notes, the »thick« texture of gamelan vanishes. Key social and cultural aspects also disappear. Moreover, the product’s literature is punctuated by words such as »magical« and »exotic,«—the same orientalist and essentialist vocabulary used to market Balinese culture in the early 1900s (Picard 1990). While digitalization increases the mobility of music, what are the cultural consequences of severing an instrument’s sounds from the instrument itself? This presentation, through theoretical and audio input, seeks to interrogate how the digitalization of traditional acoustic instruments transforms preservation and ownership.
Emma Lo (she/her) is a poet and music maker based in Berlin. She is working toward a Masters in modern South Asian and Southeast Asian studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin, with a research focus on cultural transfer of music traditions.
Programmoire: Refiguring the Archetype of the Witch for a Political Agency in the Techno-capitalist Present
Batool Desouky (Goldsmiths University of London, UK)
How can we transform the archetype of the witch into a figure relevant for modern capitalism? This presentation delves into the early relationship between capitalism and witchcraft to describe the anti-capitalist roots of magic practices and what that relationship can look like today in the context of late-capitalism as technology becomes a ubiquitous tool of oppression.
Accompanied by reflections on my own computational art project, the presentation journeys across four key terms: magic, technology, agency, and archive, to tie in the research with artistic practice. In it, I interrogate notions of techno-solutionism, productivity, and personal agency by using a combinatorics algorithm to generate sigils based on mediaeval Arabic mathematical studies of talismanic objects known in English as magic squares. By using methods long held to be the domain of computing (the use of symbolic logic and language-to-function association), I propose a form of tech-magic that highlights the presence of computational processes within witchcraft. In so doing, I articulate magic as a practice of executable intentionality to move it away from the space of »glitch« and create a witchcraft that empowers a personal and political agency through co-opting and subverting methods widely considered central to the field of technology.
Batool Desouky works with archival material, magic, and personal history to make computational research projects of variant forms. Her work was exhibited as part of Chimera Garden (2020) and How is That Working For You (2019) both at Goldsmiths, London, as well as in Collectivity: Objects and Associations in the UAE Art World, Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah (2018), and Vantage Point Sharjah, Sharjah Art Foundation (2017). She was part of a residency with Arebyte Gallery, London (2018) and Residency For Artists On Hiatus, online (2014). Batool has worked as programme coordinator and curatorial assistant at Sharjah Art Foundation (2013 – 2018) and in 2018, co-founded Tariff, a bilingual, independent publishing platform that introduces the world to artists from the SWANA region. She completed an MFA in Computational Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, 2020 and is currently based between London and Kuwait.
Sonic Manspreading: An Artistic Research Concept
Luca Soudant (Sandberg Institute, NL)
The self-coined term sonic manspreading operates as a research concept that has helped to signal and acknowledge the noisy and occupational wide-horizontal space that sticks to masculinity. Typically, Western theories on gender performativity are focused on the visual: anatomy, clothes, accessories, bodily movement, hair, etc. Alternatively, sonic manspreading investigates the spatial sonic manifestations of gender performativity. From a bottom-up and acoustic perspective, it focuses on the space-taking Eurocentric and colonial construction of masculinity that dominates and oppresses on a global scale. As term-of-departure it has moved through various projects: community-based work, performances, audio works, installations, and my writing practice.
My presentation will reflect on ways in which sonic manspreading has generated conversations and insights in the trans*formation toward more inclusive sonic worlds. On the one hand, I will reflect on how the term offers a moment of solidarity to queers, women, and femmes through a sad, at times humorous, acknowledgment of their sonic space being structurally limited by i.a. gender normativity. On the other hand, it has generated an (uncomfortable) opportunity for cultural self-reflection intending to encourage modes of active listening to gendered sonic power dynamics.
Luca Soudant has an academic research background in noise theory, queer feminist methods of inquiry, and new materialism. They graduated from the rMA Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and have developed a research-based art practice since their enrolment in the department of Critical Studies at Sandberg Institute. Their work consists of (academic) writing, performative lectures, tender listening practices, installations, and sound pieces, which aim to blur the line between theory and practice. Currently, they are continuing to develop their research into sonic manspreading, what it means to be (literally) touched by sound, and how sonic thinking can offer transformative political models toward a more inclusive world.