Book – The Noise of Being – Sonic Acts 2017

Format: 17 x 24 cm Edited by Mirna Belina and Sonic Acts Published by Sonic Acts Press, Amsterdam Designed by The Rodina Book, paperback, 212 pp., English text, illustrated €19.50 The Noise of Being digs deeper into the 2017 Sonic Acts Festival. The book explores what it means to be human, to be part of a world that is an ever-changing network and invites us to speculate about the strange and anxious state of being. The book opens with Nina Power’s essay Anticapitalism, Postcapitalism, Decapitalism, a reflection on ways of visualising opposition to capitalism. Jennifer Gabrys is interviewed about sensor technologies and changing conceptualisations of the environment, political agency, the human, and the citizen. Louis Henderson’s poetic text presents his animistic materialist cinematic practice, which focuses on the critical reading of colonial histories. In her interview, Ytasha Womack discusses how Afrofuturism facilitates different ways of navigating the world. Daniel Rourke’s essay takes John Carpenter’s The Thing as a point of reflection on the ontology of things. Rick Dolphijn’s study explicates living the wounds and the void. In relation to computational biology and the Google Genomics project, artist Joey Holder invented a speculative pharmaceutical company Ophiux. Neworked algorithms, big data, and habituation on the internet are the focus of a conversation with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. In another interview, Eyal Weizman vigorously explains the political interventions of Forensic Architecture. Jamon Van Den Hoek examines how satellite images provide and create accounts of geopolitical conflicts. Ingrid Burrington’s analyzes Earth imagery for traces of military architecture. Juha van ’t Zelfde interviews the Dutch duo Metahaven about their artistic practices in graphic design and film. The book concludes with a series of photographs that provide an impression of the festival The Noise of Being.