Book Launch The Geologic Imagination & New Year’s Reception

Sonic Acts and Gonzo (Circus) invite you to celebrate the start of the New Year on Saturday 17 January 2015 at De Balie Amsterdam. Saturday 17 January 2015 at 16.00 De Balie, Amsterdam We expect a full house, so please be quick with sending your reservation via e-mail to reservations[at]sonicacts[.]com On this afternoon, Sonic Acts officially presents the new book The Geologic Imagination. This new Sonic Acts publication is filled with wonderful interviews, essays and image contributions of theorists and artists on the forefront of today’s critical thinking on geological development. The book is a prelude to the coming Sonic Acts Festival in February; a major part of contributions is connected to the Dark Ecology project. The book also contains unearthed, a new soundwork BJ Nilsen. You can pre-order the book here and pick it up at De Balie or have it shipped to you. For the book launch we have invited Timothy Morton to speak. He is one of the contributors to the book. According to über-curator Hans Ullrich Obrist, Morton’s books are number one on the list of ‘things to know right now’. Morton’s lecture for this Saturday afternoon is entitled The Fast Track to Ecological Sadness. He will argue that we need to proceed quickly from eco-guilt and eco-shame to eco-sadness. Designer and researcher Femke Herregraven – also designer of The Geologic Imagination – will talk about her research project The All Infrared Line, which investigates the physical backbone facilitating global financial trading. More specifically she will present the research commissioned for Dark Ecology into how climate change opens up new investment opportunities for financial markets and how the melting Arctic ice will increase the speed of financial trading. Sonic Acts’ curators Lucas van der Velden and Arie Altena will interview Raviv Ganchrow about his research into infrasound for his work Long-Wave Synthesis, commissioned for Dark Ecology. This sound installation at the scale of land-art probes the relations between how we perceive the landscape and long-wave vibrations. It creates a complex topography of acoustic waves (in a range of 4 to 30 Hz) spreading out from an array of custom-built very low frequency generators. The work Long-Wave Synthesis will première during the Sonic Acts Festival. You may expect fascinating stories about his exploration of infrasound. Finally DJs from Gonzo (Circus) will provide a soundtrack of adventurous music. The Geologic Imagination (336 pp.) is a richly illustrated collection of essays, visual contributions and interviews. The publication is accompanied by unearthed, a new sound work by BJ Nilsen. The book contains essays by Timothy Morton, Douglas Kahn, Paul Bogard, Michael Welland and Raviv Ganchrow; interviews with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Matthew Coolidge, Liam Young, Noortje Marres, Kodwo Eshun, Kurt Hentschläger, and Mario de Vega; and visual contributions by Femke Herregraven, Mirna Belina, Ellsworth & Kruse, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Marijn de Jong, and BJ Nilsen & Karl Lemieux. Order the book now! Timothy Morton (US) is Professor and the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, Houston. His work explores the intersection of object-oriented thought and ecological studies. He coined the term ‘hyperobjects’ in 2010, to explain entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional localisation. Moreover, hyperobjects ruin any traditional ideas about what an ‘object’ is in the first place. Morton is the author of Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013), The Ecological Thought (2010), Ecology Without Nature (2007), seven other books, and 120 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food and music. Femke Herregraven (NL) is a designer and researcher whose work traverses the contemporary realms of global finance, information and geopolitics. Her research and speculative scenarios, in the form of websites, installations, video, prints, drawings, and games, deconstruct these power structures and explore of possible alternatives. Herregraven’s ongoing projects include Geographies of Avoidance, about the financial world’s ability to escape regulations through offshoring, and The All Infrared Line, about the physical backbone of global finance. She is curator at Sonic Acts, part of the Bitcaves collective for design and research, and has been a tutor of Design Research at ArtEZ Academy of Arts in Arnhem since 2011. Raviv Ganchrow (US/NL) completed his architectural studies at the Cooper Union, New York, in 2000, and received a second degree, in 2004, from the Institute of Sonology at The Royal Conservatory, The Hague. Ganchrow is a sound artist and researcher. His work focuses on interrelations between sound and space, aspects of which are explored through sound installations, writing and the development of acoustic-forming and vibration-sensing technologies. Since 2006 he has been a faculty member at the Institute of Sonology, The Hague. Gonzo (circus) is a printed magazine of one hundred pages in full-colour, it is a website with blogs, reviews, in-depth reports, series and more. Gonzo (circus) is also a gathering of idiosyncratic professionals who work voluntarily and curate nights with music and other art forms, initiate debates, and inspire other culture lovers: www.gonzocircus.com