Sonic Acts

This year’s edition of Sonic Acts fires up your imagination with the exploration of processes that happen on a geological scale, aiming to catalyse new forms of critical thought and artistic practices in order to give a comprehensible dimension to the life of our planet. Pretty important stuff.

26 February – 1 March – Amsterdam

Texts by Andreea Breazu

M.E.S.H.

James Whipple, aka M.E.S.H., brings his self-coined genre of ‘hard club’ to OT301. We’re curious to see what he’s been up to since his hyper-stylised PAN release Scythians, which left us hanging by a thread with its dramatic melodies and subdued bass lines.

Graham Harman

Founding member of the Speculative Realism movement and a key figure in object-oriented ontology, Harman sets the tone for the conference – and then, over drinks, will finally settle the matter of that tree falling in a forest.

Timothy Morton

Another advocate of object-oriented ontology, Morton is known for challenging common ecological assumptions, like that boring romantic notion of ‘nature’, all in the hopes of jump-starting ecological criticism and doing some damage control.

Karen Gwyer

In her search for the proudly odd, No Pain in Pop’s techno experimentalist Karen Gwyer has committed to long-form, fluid compositions in which hefty synth motifs are played till disintegration, lapsing into drone.

Douglas Kahn

Historian and theorist of media arts and author of Earth Sound Earth Signal, Kahn has written on experimental music in the context of sound studies, electromagnetism and natural media, harkening back to a time when communications technologies were still in a delicate equilibrium with the earth.

 
 For more information and tickets: www.sonicacts.com