Somersaulting Horizons and Making Sense of Sensorial Journeys
Water, ropes, metals, and mosses. Constantly challenged to multiply perspectives, the ships guide the Sensorial Journey devised for the Sonic Acts Academy to what resonates beyond – and even under – the horizon. A listening to, moving with, and breathing with that crosses participants’ pathways guide the creative process. Key to the creative process of this sensorial experience is a reflection on sensitivity to and collaboration with the environment.
As part of Sonic Acts Academy 2018, ArtScience Interfaculty in The Hague joined forces with Sonic Acts on a collaborative research project Sensing the Shipyard: A Sensorial Journey. Artist and teacher Cocky Eek led a group of ten art students to the Damen Shiprepair in Amsterdam, where they have tapped into different rhythms of the intense industrial space. This panel with project tutors – architect and creative researcher Renske Maria van Dam and Sonic Acts curatorial team member Nicky Assmann – addresses the form of a ‘sensorial journey’ but also draws on the specifics of this project such as relating our human presence to enormous living machines and creating a sensorial (and personal) map of the Shipyard saturated with different sounds, movements, surfaces, smells, scales.
Magnetic Attacks: Forty Years of Electromagnetic Investigations
Sound artist Christina Kubisch joins this symposium block to talk about her artistic practice, which deals with an acoustic world that cannot usually be heard. It is mostly based on magnetic induction but also on the research of hydrophonic sounds and solar energy. Most of her sound installations, performances, and compositions uncover a fascination with the hidden field of waves and signals around us, revealing the sonic qualities of concealed frequencies and their social and political effects. Kubisch will situate the discussion around her ongoing project Electrical Walks. This is a series of public sound walks with headphones that receive electromagnetic signals from the environment and convert them into sound. To date, she has developed 66 walks worldwide.