Sonic Acts

Tune in for episodes two and three of Sonic Trax, Sonic Acts' new podcast series, where we explore the organization's rich archive. Join us as we uncover the captivating stories behind the evolution of sound art and its lasting impact, bringing these insights closer to you! In the two-part podcast Touched by Sound: Re-imagining the Legacy of Michel Waisvisz, hosts Sève Janssen and Flavien Gillié explore the profound impact of artist, performer, and instrument maker Michel Waisvisz (1949–2008). Through personal archives, interviews with collaborators, and sounds from the Sonic Acts Archive, the duo reimagines the sonic legacy of this key figure in Amsterdam’s experimental music scene and the international arts community (notably as the director of STEIM). Waisvisz was a true trailblazer in technological art, electronic sound art, and performance! From the moment digital technology became available, he constructed experimental instruments and software activated by bodily movements such as The Hands (1984) and Crackle Synth (1974), both pressure-sensitive, touchable devices. This podcast features his sound archives, combining personal reflections from Waisvisz and his close collaborators, testimonials from those inspired by his work today, performance fragments, and radio archives spanning the 1970s to the 2000s. This exploration highlights Waisvisz' transformative approach to turning circuits into instruments of expression and vernacular moments into timeless artworks. In this process, voices, instruments, and the environmental context converge as equals, conducting a conversation where each responds with equal significance. The second episode continues the playful dimension in Michel Waisvisz’s work, questioning how a legacy can shape new generations, through the force of transmission, performance, and education, re-issuing key instruments, ideas or sets up by Waisvisz. The episode features interviews with collaborators and emerging artists such as Tarek Atoui, TakuroMizuta Lippit, JiYoun Kang, Julia Giertz, and Boris Shershenkov. Credit: The Sound Archives of Touched by Sound (Part 1) originate from the archives of Michel Waisvisz, with excerpts of interviews with Kristina Andersen, Tarek Atoui, Takuro Mizuta Lippit, Ji Youn Kang, Julia Giertz, Boris Shershenkov, with recordings from rehearsals, concerts and workshops as part of Touched by Sound, Sonic Acts Biennial in March 2024. Artistic development: Sève Janssen Montage and mix: Flavien Gillié Voiceover: Leon Rogissart Special thanks to Kristina Andersen, Tarek Atoui, Görkem Arıkan, Maud Seuntjens (Sonic Acts) and the participants of the workshop. www.sonicacts.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tune in for episodes two and three of Sonic Trax, Sonic Acts' new podcast series, where we explore the organization's rich archive. Join us as we uncover the captivating stories behind the evolution of sound art and its lasting impact, bringing these insights closer to you! In the two-part podcast Touched by Sound: Re-imagining the Legacy of Michel Waisvisz, hosts Sève Janssen and Flavien Gillié explore the profound impact of artist, performer, and instrument maker Michel Waisvisz (1949–2008). Through personal archives, interviews with collaborators, and sounds from the Sonic Acts Archive, the duo reimagines the sonic legacy of this key figure in Amsterdam’s experimental music scene and the international arts community (notably as the director of STEIM). Waisvisz was a true trailblazer in technological art, electronic sound art, and performance! From the moment digital technology became available, he constructed experimental instruments and software activated by bodily movements such as The Hands (1984) and Crackle Synth (1974), both pressure-sensitive, touchable devices. This podcast features his sound archives, combining personal reflections from Waisvisz and his close collaborators, testimonials from those inspired by his work today, performance fragments, and radio archives spanning the 1970s to the 2000s. This exploration highlights Waisvisz' transformative approach to turning circuits into instruments of expression and vernacular moments into timeless artworks. In this process, voices, instruments, and the environmental context converge as equals, conducting a conversation where each responds with equal significance. The first episode centres around Michelle Waisvisz as a composer of the present and combines personal recordings with an interview with the artist and researcher Kristina Andersen, the caretaker of his archives today. The episode explores Michel Waisvisz’ distinctive spirit through the textures of his archives, where every crackle and hum becomes a tactile reminder, and Kristina Andersen talks about how materiality can connect generations and offer a sense of continuity, even between those who have never met. Please note: Some of the archival sounds featured in this episode include Michel Waisvisz speaking in Dutch and French. In the first excerpt (Dutch, >6:40), Michel discusses his practice, describing it as musical theatre, though acknowledging that the term does not fully capture its essence. In the second excerpt (French, >9:15), a reporter and Michel highlight how his electronic music devices generate new, futuristic, and otherworldly sounds. In the final excerpt (Dutch, >15:15), we hear Michel reflecting on an analogy between striving for a climax in music performance and the myth of Tantalus. Credit: The sound archives of Touched by Sound (Part 1) originate from the archives of Michel Waisvisz: Bologna 16-07-1982; Lisboa 14/15-02-1987; Bimhuis Amsterdam solo 08-09-1978; France Culture June 1987; Cologne 24-11-1978; Toklos Zurich 08-2-1986; Hands Houston 13-04-1986; various minidiscs, and excerpts of an interview with Kristina Andersen at the Bimhuis, Amsterdam, conducted on 2 March 2024. Artistic development: Sève Janssen Editing and mixing: Flavien Gillié Voiceover: Leon Rogissart Special thanks to Kristina Andersen, Tarek Atoui, Görkem Arıkan, Maud Seuntjens (Sonic Acts) and the participants of the workshops. www.sonicacts.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does it mean to DJ an archive? In the debut instalment of a new podcast series by Sonic Acts, junior curator Hannah Pezzack interviews Ruben Verkuylen (The Social Lover) about his DJ set from the 2024 Biennial, where he reimagined Sonic Acts archival material through turntablist techniques, sample pads, and effects. Recorded live at Het HEM and later broadcast by NTS Radio, his set drew upon a rich array of concerts, lectures, and conversations from 2003 to 2006 – a transformative era for electronic music, computing cultures, and digital art. Discussing his process, Verkuylen reflects on pivotal technological shifts, from the work of early computer art pioneer Lillian Schwartz to the artistic possibilities of AI in the present day. Featuring snippets from his deep dive, the podcast explores what it means to remix archives as a form of collage – reinterpreting and layering history, and connecting to contemporary sound practices. Sonic Trax: Remixing the History of Sound Art is a podcast by Sonic Acts exploring the institution's archive, which dates back to the mid-1990s. Examining creative approaches and interventions, the series reveals broader narratives about the lineage of sound art, tracing its evolution and enduring resonance. Sonic Acts Archive projects are supported by the Mondriaan Fonds and Cultuurloket DigitALL. Realised by Paradiso and Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union. CREDITS Recorded at Erik's house, Amsterdam Sound design and editing by Tobias Withers SHOW NOTES The Social Lover on NTS Radio – 30 Years of Sonic Acts (Guest mix for Elena Colombi) https://www.nts.live/shows/elena-colombi/episodes/elena-colombi-28th-october-2024 The Social Lover – SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/the-social-lover Plafond 8 by Ekolali / Tala Drum Corps https://bakk.bandcamp.com/album/plafond-8 The Art of Programming – Sonic Acts Press (2001) https://shop.sonicacts.com/product/the-art-of-programming-sonic-acts-2001 The Art of Point • Pixel • Programming – Sonic Acts Press (2001) https://shop.sonicacts.com/product/the-art-of-pointpixelprogramming Synthetic Vocabulary by Raung Jagat Synthetic https://prakarsa.bandcamp.com/album/synthetic-vocabulary Plastic Symphonies by Siriosa's Post-Human Symphonic Choir https://prakarsa.bandcamp.com/album/plastic-symphonies Woodstock (1970 documentary film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock_(film) TRANCE: Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 https://2024.sonicacts.com/programme/trance From In Gome.. Wisisi. Dari Gome Papua https://youtu.be/K48ajhogw5Y Jammer https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkwbCp6tQZHAJD1UQnQCZtg Venetian Snares https://venetiansnares.bandcamp.com/

Accompanied by her modular synthesiser, xenologist scholar and artist Adriana Knouf's presentation is proposed as a love letter. Eschewing the binary logic that pervades Western thinking, Knouf argues that all beings – trans*, cis, and xeno – are in a constant process of flux and transformation, always already more-than-human. From syringes of ​oestrogen to the trajectories of satellites orbiting the Earth, she investigates ongoing and future processes of ‘xenomogrifications’ – the becoming of something else. Following her talk, Adriana Knouf also sat down with Hannah Pezzack to talk about everything from Elon Musk and SpaceX, to fungi and making synth parts. Find it amongst Sonic Acts Podcast episode or here on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/sonicacts/adriana-knouf-interview → Explore more of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 programme at https://2024.sonicacts.com CREDITS Production: Sonic Acts Camera: Engage! TV Intro sound: Jessica Ekomane Intro design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser Part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, a collaboration between Paradiso and Sonic Acts (NL), funded by Creative Europe.

In Louisiana, artist, activist, writer, and architectural researcher Imani Jacqueline Brown uncovers Black antebellum cemeteries – portals to recover and remember Afro-diasporic ecological praxes. Between 1820 and 1865, enslaved people were forced to clear Louisiana’s primordial forests to make way for the expansion of cane. They preserved small sections of forest where their loved ones were interred. These groves are both remnants of the erased bottomland hardwood forest and carefully stewarded microecologies – time capsules of lifeworlds that thrived against all odds in the back-a-plantations. There, enslaved people tended gardens and planted trees; organised dances and rituals; exchanged information and ideas; experimented with temporalities of freedom and plotted revolts. Today, their groves, which have survived generations of racial violence, industrial encroachment, and climate disaster, stand as the frontlines of more-than-human, intergenerational resistance to the continuum of extractivism. 24 Feb 2024 Amsterdam, Netherlands → Explore more of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 programme at 2024.sonicacts.com CREDITS Production: Sonic Acts Camera: Engage! TV Intro sound: Jessica Ekomane Intro design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

Following lectures from scholars Astrida Neimanis and M Murphy at Sonic Acts Biennial 2024, both were joined on the Symposium stage by artist Sissel Marie Tonn for a conversation addressing many topics, from pollution and violence, to language, creative methods, and direct action. Guided by questions from the audience, they also address indigenous knowledge and research, discussing how to negotiate one's position within Western science and university systems, as well as direct action methods. 24 Feb 2024 Amsterdam, Netherlands → Explore more of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 programme at https://2024.sonicacts.com CREDITS Production: Sonic Acts Camera: Engage! TV Intro sound: Jessica Ekomane Intro design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union. The visit of Astrida Neimanis was made possible by the International Visitors Programme of the Nieuwe Instituut with support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Author and researcher Astrida Neimanis gives the opening lecture at Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 Symposium. In a time of extinction and climate catastrophe, how are we to feel? Feeling intensifies, but also wavers. Feeling's temporal container pulses, its membrane now more porous: the past seeps in, the future jumps the gun. Feeling anything swims in the wake of what once was, and is burdened by what will or will not remain tomorrow. How do species-strangers care for and hold one another? What do we touch when we touch another, and what touches us back? Meditating on various instances of multispecies contact, moving from the edge of the ocean to the scientist's workbench, this talk examines the curious relationships between language and feeling, presence and absence, solid ground and being untethered at sea. 24 Feb 2024 Amsterdam, Netherlands The lecture was followed by a Q&A session with scholar M Murphy, artist Sissel Marie Tonn, and audience members. → Explore more of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 programme at https://2024.sonicacts.com CREDITS Production: Sonic Acts Camera: Engage! TV Intro sound: Jessica Ekomane Intro design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union. The visit of Astrida Neimanis was made possible by the International Visitors Programme of the Nieuwe Instituut with support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In this performative lecture, artist Juan Arturo García presents his research project about a nuclear reactor in Colombia. Radioactivity, earthquakes, and applications like geochronology are used as props to explore the paradoxes of trying to visualise inaccessible phenomena. García’s translation, or poetics of displacement, taps into the present cultural, mystical, and political consequences of technological deployments in Latin America. The lecture is followed by a Q&A session with Professor Alice Twemlow and audience members. 25 Feb 2024 Amsterdam, The Netherlands → Explore more of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 programme at https://2024.sonicacts.com CREDITS Production: Sonic Acts Camera: Engage! TV Intro sound: Jessica Ekomane Intro design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

Filmmaker and researcher Solveig Qu Suess traces how water, infrastructure, and documentary film intertwine. Her lecture follows the flood pulse of Southeast Asia's main river – the Mekong – since the 1990s. Construction of hydroelectric dams has caused drastic changes, reconfiguring downstream landscapes to accommodate for the expansion of plantations. Instead of being governed by the seasons, Suess tells us that the river's rhythms are now dictated by the energetic demands of distant cities. Along the banks of the Mekong, protagonists navigate a rogue river. A man measures the water every morning to monitor opaque activities from faraway dams, while a boat captain leaks information to environmental activists, and cascading rapids grow into mountains, creating both a border frontier and a new home. The lecture is followed by a Q&A session with Professor Alice Twemlow and audience members. 25 Feb 2024 Amsterdam, The Netherlands → Explore more of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 programme at https://2024.sonicacts.com

Researcher, educator, and curator Margarida Mendes’ lecture asks how our understanding of the environment is shaped on different scales from the way we sense, to social protocols and intergovernmental infrastructures. For Mendes, a collective sense of our surroundings is formed by practices and policies that mould our ecological pedagogies and politics, giving space (or not) to future worlds. Through her work she transmits an ontology of the sensory, starting with her experiments in listening to riverine sites that are undergoing transformation. Addressing acts of sensory co-emergence as non-linear and intertwined with ecosystems, she questions how the protocols of listening intercede with one’s relation to environmental grief, and what role the environmental humanities has in developing better ears towards the planet. The lecture is followed by a Q&A session with curator and researcher Rachael Rakes, as well as audience members. 24 Feb 2024 Amsterdam, The Netherlands → Explore more of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 programme at https://2024.sonicacts.com CREDITS Production: Sonic Acts Camera: Engage! TV Intro sound: Jessica Ekomane Intro design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

In 1978, in the Dutch towns of Veghel and Almelo, two groups of migrant women from Turkey were involved in simultaneous labour disputes. They asked their employers for collective agreements, regular work hours, higher pay, and holiday time. The labour-intensive work of plucking chicken feathers in Almelo and peeling onions in Veghel has been lost in institutional archives – only traces of these historical moments remain. As sağ illuminates, the institutional archive guides the researcher towards constructing a coherent narrative. Meanwhile, the subjects of those histories voice different realities, expressed through touch, smell, jokes, movement and gossip. A historical analysis of the climate crisis reveals how power is concentrated on certain classes and resources. Countering such mechanisms entails actively investing in structures of collective care, repair (and reparations), centralising affected communities and their lineages, and collectively imagining nonlinearly and otherwise, also in the way the histories are reimagined through the archives. Here, the embodied surfaces as the basis of thought and action where there is a growing need to ground ourselves within our bodies, our communities, and our environments in order to connect to ourselves and beyond. The lecture is followed by a Q&A session with Rachael Rakes and audience members. 24 February 2024 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands → Explore more of the 2024 Biennial programme at https://2024.sonicacts.com CREDITS Camera: Engage! TV Design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser Production: Sonic Acts Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

Moving through extended material and research from the making of the video work 'Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum', filmmaker Arjuna Neuman and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva explore their creative collaboration. The second instalment in the Elemental Cinema series, which takes up the elements to reimagine the world otherwise, 'Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum' is a film dedicated to tenderness. Reproducing a radical sensibility learned from listening to the blues, to skin, heat, echoes, and listening itself, it reimagines the human and its subject formation away from predatory desire and lethal abstraction, which manifest as ethnography, border regimes, slavery, sexual abuse, trade, and mining. Instead, tenderness is explored as a raw material. Remembering that to be tender is to soften like supple grass, and that to attend to is to care for – to serve. Serving, we know, is the opposite of slavery, just as violence dissolves with care. 25 February 2024 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands → Explore more of the 2024 Biennial programme at https://2024.sonicacts.com CREDITS Camera: Engage! TV Design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser Production: Sonic Acts Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

In her live multichannel performance ‘How to Love a Tree’, Hira Nabi weaves together whispered narratives from sylvan landscapes, misty mountain sides, ghosts of extraction and British imperialism, inviting us into forest time. Part of an ongoing artistic project, launched in 2019, ‘How to Love a Tree’ documents the former colonial hill stations in the blue pine forests of Murree and the Galiyat region of Pakistan. Nabi sees these places as ecosystems that are crumbling, marked by a history of imperial rule. She focuses on making remnants of this painful past visible in what are now tourist destinations in the hills. Here, traces of exploitation mingle with expressions of capitalism, while the deterioration of the environment continues. → Explore more of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 programme at https://2024.sonicacts.com Recorded 25 Feb 2024 Amsterdam, The Netherlands CREDITS Camera: Engage! TV Sound logo: Jessica Ekomane Design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser Production: Sonic Acts Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

Starlings sing new songs when they grow-up in persistently polluted lands. Desires and sexualities shift. The relations of our bodies go far beyond the skin, stretching outwards to lands, waters, non-humans, ancestors, and those yet to come. We make one another in difficult conditions. What can we become? How can we dream of land-body desires when fossil fuel capitalism and colonialism continues to thrive? Following Frantz Fanon’s example of ‘inserting invention into existence’, M Murphy brings Metis, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee feminist and queer land-body relations to offer a desire-based and after-pessimism vision of anti-colonial justice. 24 February 2024 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands → Explore more of the 2024 Biennial programme at https://2024.sonicacts.com CREDITS Camera: Engage! TV Design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser Production: Sonic Acts Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

This conversation takes as its starting point Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner's most recent film, 'My Want of You Partakes of Me'. The film, which was on view as part of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 exhibition at W139, is the third instalment of a trilogy. It proposes that digestion is a fundamental condition for organisms to be in the world, a process with physiological and psychological dimensions as well as spiritual and literary implications. Told through a nonlinear, multiperspectival narrative, the film presents a political poetics of incorporation. Here the filmmakers engage in a close dialogue with author Elvia Wilk, who writes about corporeality, decomposition, and transformation through such diverse lenses as mediaeval mysticism, horror, and science fiction. Wilk was also the editor of Litvintseva and Wagner's book 'All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film' published by Sonic Acts Press in 2021. Together the three share a deep interest in historical excavation as a means of engaging the present moment, and expand on the many meeting points between their work across genres. 25 February 2024 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands → Explore more of the 2024 Biennial programme at https://2024.sonicacts.com CREDITS Audio: Engage! TV Production: Sonic Acts Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

Writer, musician, and xenologist, Adriana Knouf is the first (known) trans artist to send artwork into outer space. Her multidisciplinary practice is inspired by, amongst many other sources, queer/feminist science-fiction, trans-activist zines from the 1970s, and The Xenofeminist Manifesto (2015) by the international collective Laboria Cuboniks. She is the founding facilitator of the tranxxenolab, ‘a nomadic artistic research laboratory that promotes entanglements among entities trans and xeno’. Knouf designs and sells synthesiser modules through her company 'selestium modular', also performing with them live under the name Selestra. Following her lecture – 'Some Fragments of Xenology: ‘you realise that the fieldlines intersect at the unexpected moment already’ – at the Sonic Acts Biennial ‘24 symposium, Knouf sat down to talk with Hannah Pezzack. Their conversation journeys far and wide, covering everything from Elon Musk and SpaceX, to fungi and modular synthesisers. 9 March 2024 W139, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Research: https://tranxxenolab.net/ Synth modules: https://modular.selestium.net/ Sound: https://selestra.bandcamp.com/album/d... → Explore more of the 2024 Biennial programme at https://2024.sonicacts.com CREDITS Interview: Hannah Pezzack Camera: Roman Ermolaev Design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser Production: Sonic Acts Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

Hydrofeminist scholar Astrida Neimanis – author of the formative book 'Bodies of Water' (2017) – is interviewed by Sonic Acts curator and editor Hannah Pezzack in the context of Sonic Acts Biennial 2024. Ahead of the workshop Weathering Together, which took place at Zone2Source on 22 February, and their presentation, 'Holdfast (Learning Feeling)' at the Sonic Acts symposium, Neimanis dived into her research and writing practices. The engaging conversation touched on poetry, hydrophones, and liquid language. 22 February 2024 Zone2Source (Amstelpark), Amsterdam, The Netherlands → Explore more of the 2024 Biennial programme at https://2024.sonicacts.com Realised by Paradiso and Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union. The visit of Astrida Neimanis was alsomade possible by the International Visitors Programme of the Nieuwe Instituut with support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Curation & production: Sonic Acts Sound mastering: Gleb Foulga

19 May 2023 – Ruigoord, Amsterdam Fred Carter’s introductory talk at Maritime Frictions follows hydrological and logistical flows across transitional waters of the IJ estuary and the oil terminals of the Port of Amsterdam. Tracing the emergent turn to fieldwork across practice-based and environmental research, Carter asks: how might we develop practices and tactics in accordance with the IJ’s estuarine field? Fred Carter has been a Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre and an associate researcher at Linnaeus University. In 2022, Carter was Saltire Emerging Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, where he is co-director of the residency programme FieldARTS. His debut poetry chapbook, Outages, will be published by Veer2 in 2023. Drawing together artistic and critical practices, Sonic Acts and FieldARTS’ collaborative event Maritime Frictions also included field presentations from Harpo ’t Hart and Frank Bloem (Embassy of the North Sea), a listening walk with Lance Laoyan, a lecture by Charmaine Chua, a performance lecture by Liquid Time (Jacob Bolton and Miriam Matthiessen), a screening of Michaela Büsse’s ‘Building with Nature’ (2022), a sound performance from Velma Spell, ending with a DJ set by Nessim for the after party. https://sonicacts.com/agenda/maritime-frictions Maritime Frictions is a part of New Perspectives for Action, a project by Re-Imagine Europe co-funded by the European Union. CREDITS Curation & production: Sonic Acts Video editing: Bin Koh Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

19 May 2023 – Ruigoord, Amsterdam Speculating on logistics as a project of time management, Liquid Time’s lecture performance at Maritime Frictions considers processes of distributing, expropriating and configuring planetary time. Based on field research carried out in the IJ estuary to the west of Amsterdam, the duo maps out three sites throughout time that each, in their own way, encapsulated enact a particular temporal dynamic within maritime space: from the harbour that shielded Dutch East India Company ships from storms in the sixteenth century, to the newly opened Sea Lock – the largest moving metal structure in the world – designed to allow mega ships to enter Amsterdam. Along the way, Liquid Time charted the oceanic and anthropogenic rhythms that form each location, the building blocks of what they call the ‘infrarhythm’ of logistics. Liquid Time (Jacob Bolton and Miriam Matthiessen) are a research duo working around shipping, finance, and the temporalities of maritime worlds. Miriam Matthiessen is a researcher interested in critical logistics and urban political ecology. Jacob Bolton is an architectural researcher interested in supply chain violence and resource struggle. Drawing together artistic and critical practices, Sonic Acts and FieldARTS’ collaborative event Maritime Frictions also included field presentations from Harpo ’t Hart and Frank Bloem (Embassy of the North Sea), a listening walk with Lance Laoyan, talks by Fred Carter and Charmaine Chua, a screening of Michaela Büsse’s ‘Building with Nature’ (2022), a sound performance by Velma Spell, ending with a DJ set by Nessim. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/agenda/maritime-frictions Maritime Frictions is a part of 'New Perspectives for Action', a project by Re-Imagine Europe co-funded by the European Union. CREDITS Video editing: Bin Koh Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

Embassy of the North Sea (Frank Bloem and Harpo 't Hart) – Fieldwork Presentation 19 May 2023 – Ruigoord, Amsterdam During their fieldwork presentation for Maritime Frictions, Frank Bloem and Harpo 't Hart observed the port of Amsterdam from a chemical point of view, following their nose and ears to smell and listen to the stories of life in the harbour. Throughout their presentation, the pair interweaved narratives of extractivism and international trade told by biological and fossilised bulk goods with stories of the marine life living on the hulls of cargo ships. Founded in 2018, The Embassy of the North Sea departs from the idea that the North Sea belongs to and should own itself. It researches how nonhumans, from phytoplankton to ship wrecks to cod fish, can become full-fledged members of our society. The Embassy works towards 2030, when we (humans) hope to emotionally, juridically and politically relate ourselves to the sea in a fundamentally different way. Maritime Frictions was a collaborative event organised by Sonic Acts and FieldARTS’ in Ruigoord, west of Amsterdam. The programme included a listening walk with Lance Laoyan, talks by Fred Carter and Charmaine Chua, a performance lecture by Liquid Time (Jacob Bolton and Miriam Matthiessen), a screening of Michaela Büsse’s ‘Building with Nature’ (2022), a sound performance from Velma Spell, and DJ set by Nessim. Explore the more from the programme at https://sonicacts.com/agenda/maritime-frictions Maritime Frictions is a part of New Perspectives for Action, a project by Re-Imagine Europe co-funded by the European Union. CREDITS Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Roman Ermolaev Video editing: Bin Koh Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros