Keynote

Brandon LaBelle

Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist living in Berlin. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including: The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-23), Oficina de Autonomia (2017), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: Dreamtime X (2022), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015). His latest book in sound studies, Acoustic Justice (2021), argues for an acoustic model by which to engage questions of social equality.

Sounding Cosmopoetical Futures

Questions of agency, of working at paths of self-determination, and the crafting of alliances and solidarities across communities, can be heard to gain traction by way of sounded expressions. From rhythms of coordinated collaboration to the punctuations of noise that interrupt norms of intelligibility, sound lends to mobilizing new social imaginaries and configurations. Exploring these perspectives, the presentation opens a speculative space for attending to sound as a vibrant matter which can contribute to what adrienne marie brown terms “emergent strategies”. As brown highlights, emergent strategies work at fostering critical connections and authentic relationships in support of human flourishing. Mapping sound as an emergent strategy, the presentation includes a consideration of listening, and how listening contributes to anchoring us in a shared world. As such, listening fosters compassion and care, enabling forms of mutuality and radical receptivity that give challenge to dominant systems. These perspectives and propositions will be elaborated through specific artistic examples, to explore how sound affords ways of practicing that opens onto a cosmopoetical future of ecological solidarity.

Keynote

Anna Dumitriu

Anna Dumitriu is an internationally renowned award-winning British artist who works with BioArt, sculpture, installation, and digital media to explore our relationship with cutting-edge technologies, infectious diseases, and synthetic biology. Past exhibitions include ZKM, Ars Electronica, BOZAR, The Picasso Museum, Timisoara 2023 European Capital of Culture, The Nobel Prize Museum, Kunstlerhaus Vienna, MIT Museum, Liljevalchs, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, MOCA Taipei, HeK Basel, LABoral, Art Laboratory Berlin, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the 6th Guangzhou Triennial, and The History of Science Museum Oxford.  Her work is held in major collections, including ZKM, the Science Museum London and Eden Project.

She has been featured in many books including Bio Art: Altered Realities published by Thames and Hudson in 2016 and many other significant publications across contemporary art and science including Frieze, Artforum International Magazine, Leonardo Journal, The Art Newspaper, Art Quarterly, Nature, and The Lancet. She holds artist-in-residence roles with the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at the University of Oxford, the National Collection of Type Cultures at the UK Health Security Agency, and Institute of Epigenetics and Stem Cells at Helmholtz Zentrum in München, as well as visiting research fellowships with Waag and the School of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire as part of the BioComputation Research Group. Current collaborations include The University of Leeds, the Wellcome Sanger, Kings College London, Brighton and Sussex Medical School and BOKU University in Vienna.

BioArt Revolutions: Exploring Cutting Edge Science through Art

Anna Dumitriu will discuss how art can explore and communicate our relationship to science and biomedicine at a time when we face rapid and revolutionary changes. She will focus on her recent solo exhibitions "BioArt Revolution", and "The Mutability of Memories and Fates". These breath-taking and beautiful exhibitions weave together alchemy, and the history of science and medicine, with cutting-edge research in biotechnology, and robotics, including CRISPR DNA modification, biomedical AI systems, and neural networks.  The exhibitions included sculptures and installations made using bacteria, DNA, altered vintage objects, 3D printing, textiles and digital technologies.

Artist Talk

Ernst Karel

Ernst Karel works with sound, including electroacoustic music, experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, image-sound collaboration, and postproduction sound for nonfiction film, with an emphasis on observational cinema. Lately he works around the practice of actuality/location recording (or 'fields [plural] recording') and composing with those recordings, with recent projects also taking up archival location recordings. Sound projections have been presented at Sonic Acts, Amsterdam; Oboro, Montreal; EMPAC, Troy NY; Arsenal, Berlin; and the  2014 Whitney Biennial. Sound installations in collaboration with Helen Mirra have been exhibited at the Gardner Museum, Boston; Culturgest, Lisbon; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Audiorama, Stockholm; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; and in the 2012 São Paulo Bienal. Audio-video collaborations include  Expedition Content (2020, with Veronika Kusumaryati), Ah humanity! (2015, with Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel) and Single Stream (2014, with Toby Lee and Pawel Wojtasik). CDs of his often collaborative work, including with the electroacoustic duo EKG, have been released on and/OAR, Another Timbre, Cathnor, Gruenrekorder, Locust, Sedimental, and Sshpuma record labels, and a duo with Bhob Rainey is forthcoming on Erstwhile. From 2006 until 2017 he managed the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, doing postproduction sound for films including Sweetgrass, The Iron Ministry, Manakamana, and Leviathan. He has taught audio recording and composition through the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard (through 2021), the Center for Experimental Ethnography at Penn (2019), and the Department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley (2022). He is currently an affiliate of the Center for Ethnographic Media Arts at the University of Southern California.