Sonic Acts Biennial 2026: Heart Rests Twice #4

How do we understand so-called ‘intelligence’? And how is AI weaponised, used for control, and woven into everyday life? Listening for ghosts haunting machines, the fourth instalment of Heart Rests Twice – a curated series unfolding across five Thursday nights at murmur during Sonic Acts Biennial 2026 – focuses on sound, code, and archival fragments. Prising open infrastructure and hidden networks, the artists bring alternative techno-futures into view, charting speculative trajectories outward.

Writer and researcher Flavia Dzodan presents a live listening session around Transatlantic Drift – an algorithmic sound work on migration, absence, and the impossibility of return. Continuous shifting tones trace an Atlantic crossing, fed by live weather data, as the audience witnesses the code unfold in real time, refusing closure, and sonifying displacement.

Sondi presents a newly commissioned audiovisual performance, Non-User Friendly, on the ecological, political, and cultural realities of AI, with a soundtrack by Kween. Within the interactive work, human and machine confront each other, troubling the fantasy of neutrality and exposing extractive logics.

Mexican sound artist Leslie García reworks the Sun Ra / El Saturn tape archive – over 600 tapes recorded by the legendary Afrofuturist composer – by listening to the margins: glitches, interruptions, and atemporal residues. Through spectral analysis, synthesis, and AI, she turns these traces into restless, time-bending sound worlds that open portals toward Sun Ra’s ‘other planes of there’ – parallel universes beyond the dominant worldview.

Heart Rests Twice draws together artists who work across discursive formats, composition, audiovisual performance to explore ideas of home, place, and belonging. In Amsterdam Noord, murmur’s custom-built surround sound system comes alive with vibration and conversation. Tuning into the pulse of the heartbeat – a circular rhythm – the series invites a heartfelt, hearingful mode of engagement – a way of listening that is not only receptive but relational, even transformative. The concerts will be followed by a Q&A.

The people at Sonic Acts have kindly offered a limited amount of free tickets for Subbacultcha members. Please make a reservation by sending an email to mailinglist@subbacultcha.nl with ‘Sonic Acts: Heart Rests Twice #4′ in the subject line + your name in the email.

Registrations are open until 12.00 PM on weekdays.