Published on Vimeo: Research through Practice

Tuesday 3 May 20:26

If you missed the Sonic Acts Academy, or would like to refresh your memory, you are in luck. Many lectures and performances have been documented and Sonic Acts will be publishing a lot of material over the course of the coming months assembling videos that touch on related subjects into albums. The second of these albums is titled Research through Practice, and touches on a cornerstone of the Academy which aimed to highlight artistic engagement as vital to understanding the complexities of our contemporary world. Over the course of three days, artists presented works that challenge the sterile dichotomy of theory versus practice. On Saturday 27 February and Sunday 28 February, a selection of artists explained the ways in which they conduct research through practice. Included in the album are presentations by by Ana Vaz, Ewa Justka, Anton Kats and Louis Henderson who each do just this.

Louis Henderson: “Animism is the only sensible version of materialism” from Sonic Acts on Vimeo.

The title of Louis Henderson lecture on 27 February, ‘Animism is the only sensible version of materialism’, is inspired by a quote from anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and forms a basis around which Henderson builds his video works. Henderson describes his practice as ‘archeological cinema’, through which he conducts a materialist reading of the digital and the space of the Internet as an archival/archaeological site, within which resistance to capitalism and social control can be excavated and engendered. A short reflection on Hendersons’ talk by Hannah Klaubert is on the Critical Writing blog

Ana Vaz: i prefer not to be but to Tupi: the age of the earth from Sonic Acts on Vimeo.

On Sunday 28 February, Brazilian artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz presented ‘i prefer not to be but to Tupi: the age of the earth’. In it she screened segments of her films and read excerpts from of her writing and performances, which speculate on the relationships between history and its representation. Vaz: ‘I want to disorganise, to dissociate through association – to bring things together in order to undo their normative state. A multiple becoming through film or otherwise, an untying of historical thinking and monolithic prose, a becoming that renders narration an art of trickery, of cheating and betraying both sight or sound only to permanently de-colonise our modes of thinking.

Ewa Justka: Odd DIY Spectacle from Sonic Acts on Vimeo.

During Odd DIY Spectacle, Polish artist Ewa Justka reflected on her current trajectory as a noise and performance artist, in academic research environments. One of her main topics is the exploration of the materiality of the hidden, which she investigates through quasi-direct perception in noise performance actions, interactive installations, DIY electronics, hardware hacking, plant-molesting, breaking, deconstructing and collaborating.

Anton Kats: Radio Sound System from Sonic Acts on Vimeo.

Anton Kats ended Sonic Acts Academy on Sunday afternoon with his Radio Sound System. Kats’ history with radio is a long one, dating from his early memories of growing up in Ukraine to recent projects in Jamaica. Kats reflects and subverts the more established news and entertainment radio formats. During his presentation at Sonic Acts Academy, he introduced parts of this history through a performative narrative, while live broadcasting it through an ad hoc pirate radio transmission. There is more about the history of Anton Kats’ narrowcasting in this post by Katia Truijen on the Critical Writing blog. For the entire Sonic Acts Academy 2016: Research through Practice Vimeo Album click here.

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