Saturday 27 February 2016

PIN (1988)




One of the best ventriloquism films I've seen. The wonderful thing about it is how PIN's voice is only validated as being a ventriloquised voice of another body after two thirds of the movie (and a string of suspicious tragedies) have passed.

Saturday 20 June 2015

Book Launch: Eleni Ikoniadou's The Rhythmic Event — Showroom


ELENI  IKONIADOU's
THE RHYTHMIC EVENT

BOOK LAUNCH
at THE SHOWROOM

on THURSDAY
25 JUNE '15

18h30-21h30



An event & discussion to celebrate
the publication (MIT Press, 2014).

Speakers include:
Eleni Ikoniadou
Matthew Fuller
Olga Goriunova
Kodwo Eshun



In The Rhythmic Event, Eleni Ikoniadou seeks ways of redefining the digital media artwork as an assemblage of sensations that outlive the space, time, and bodies that constitute and experience it. Ikoniadou proposes that the notion of rhythm—detached, however, from the idea of counting and regularity—can unlock the imperceptible, aesthetic potential enveloping the digital artwork. She speculates how addressing the event on the level of rhythm affords us a glimpse into the nonhuman modalities of thought, proper to the digital and hidden in the gaps between strict definitions (human/sonic/digital) and false dichotomies (virtual/real).

Operating at the margins of perception, the rhythmic artwork summons an obscure zone of sonic thought, which considers an event according to its power to become.

The Rhythmic Event is part of the Technologies of Lived Abstraction series, edited by Brian Massumi and Erin Manning.


Eleni Ikoniadou is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Kingston University, UK. She is author of The Rhythmic Event (MIT Press, 2014, Technologies of Lived Abstraction series), co-editor of the edited volume Media After Kittler (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2015) and co-editor of the Media Philosophy Series (RLI).

Wednesday 24 September 2014

Friday 13 June 2014

Sounding the Counterfactual & Transmètic Heresiarcs — June 27-8

SOUNDING THE COUNTERFACTUAL: HYPERSTITION & AUDIAL FUTURITIES

Stream organizers: David Cecchetto, Marc Couroux, eldritch Priest

LONDON CONFERENCE IN CRITICAL THOUGHT
June 27-8, Goldsmiths, University of London.


That sound and affect are fatally entangled should be obvious, for they share a primordial relation to a zone of indetermination between unconscious bodily impingements and their selective, conscious actualization. This is further suggested by the way sound's im-mediacy and hearing's continuous intake figure audition as a amenability to influenza of various forms that nudge virtual potentials towards predetermined outcomes. For contemporary cybercapitalist power, sound's affective/infective nature plays a key role in ratifying its need to preserve homeostasis through a negative feedback that holds matter and information as equal realities. According to Anahid Kassabian, in a world of ubiquitous, networked technologies, music and sound are crucial vectors across which distributed-informatic subjectivities are constituted, a position advanced by the third wave of cybernetics wherein machinic, mediatic, and prosthetic ecologies have become indissociable from biological processes. Indeed, within this human/non-human commingling control operates virtually, nested within affective states that "unfold the past into the present” and inflect "the way the present acts on the past to unravel a new future.”

Hyperstition, a term coined by the Ccru (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) and most often attributed to its chief ideologue Nick Land, is a useful point of intervention within a system that suppresses contingency, futurity. According to Land, "hyperstitions by their very existence as ideas function causally to bring about their own reality…transmuting fictions into truths.” Such a formulation is exemplified by finance capitalism's investment in fictional entities such as futures and derivatives to compose an abstract but no less real dimension of profit. However, the manner in which the power of the virtual has been exploited by inhumanist capital to bring about the reality of a speculative profit—as in branding's sorcerous implantation of false memories and future desires, which rewire the very notion of lived experience—points to the promise of hyperstition as producing counterfactual lines of actualization that compel the world to unaffordable futures.

How might sound (noise = rumore (It.) = rumor), the virological, immanent medium par excellence—acoustic space as networked space—be productively leveraged for its capacities to induce, bend, and channel affective potential? How might the effective powers of fiction be sonically enacted? How might spatial redistributions of mobile electronic sound galvanize emergent social and political structures?

PANEL 1—Friday June 27, 11h30-13h00 ("Room 6") (room specifics to come)

Lendl Barcelos—Anethics of Aural Ambiguity
David Cecchetto—Hyperstitional Algorithms, capital and sounding art
Eleni Ikoniadou—Abstract Audio

PANEL 2—Saturday June 28, 16h45-18h15 ("Room 3")

Charlie Blake & Isabella Van Elferen—The Return of the Überthing: Sonic Spectrality, Affective Engineering & Temporal Paradox
Joey Ryken—Asymmetrical warfare in Sound, Magic and Humour: Psycho-sonic parody, slap‐stick, neuroaesthetics, and supra‐sensory chicanery
eldritch Priest (assisted by Marc Couroux)—[Title TBA]

&

TRANSMÈTIC HERESIARCS: a phonoccultural satellite [FB]
FRIDAY JUNE 27, 20h—1h
LEWISHAM ARTHOUSE: 140 Lewisham Way (near Gsmiths)

Modulating between the abstract/(in)aesthetic through the rhythmic/4-to-the-floor and back again, Transmètic is a night of schizo-disciplinary interchange. A hyperstitional continuum of technofuturist outliers—a heresiarc—collapses the counterfactual emanations of cybervisionaries AUDiNT and Mer Roberts of [0rphan]D[rift>] with the ‘pataphysically mètic incantations of Lord Auch! (Lendl Barcelos, Marc Couroux & Amy Ireland), Bibliothèque and Plastique Fantastique as evidence of an ongoing xenochronic call to the Old (Ph)ones.