Festival Editions > Sonic Acts Festival 2015 – The Geologic Imagination
Sonic Acts Festival 2015 – The Geologic Imagination
Sonic Acts Festival 2015 recap video
26 February - 1 March 2015
We have been studying the sky and the stars since at least Sumerian times. Some of us are old enough to remember man’s first landing on the moon. We have ventured far into outer space. Voyager 1, dispatched by NASA in 1977, has left our solar system, entered interstellar space, and at a distance of approximately 19.5 billion kilometres from the Sun, is still transmitting data to Earth. But how much do we actually know about the ground beneath our feet? We probably know more about the Moon than about the deep oceans, more about the skies above our heads than about what is underground.
Inspired by geosciences, The Geologic Imagination zoomed in on planet Earth. A fundamental starting point for this festival was the thesis that we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Human activity has irreversibly changed the composition of the atmosphere, the oceans, and even the Earth’s crust. In the Anthropocene, humans have become a force on a geologic scale. Scientists have estimated, for instance, that humans move more sediment, sand and rocks annually than rivers, erosion and other nonhuman processes. Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation even states in his interview in the book that accompanies this festival that ‘every molecule on the surface of the Earth has been affected by humans’.
All of this challenge us to rethink our attachments to the world, and our concepts of nature, culture and ecology. How do we conceive of the world? How do we understand the systems and processes of nature, and our intentions and interactions with the planet?
With the festival, we examined how art and science map and document new insights, and how the changes and transformations that occur on a geological scale can become something humans can feel, touch, and experience.
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Sonic Acts Festival 2015. Photo by Pieter Kers.
Sonic Acts Festival 2015. Photo by Pieter Kers.
Sonic Acts Festival 2015. Photo by Pieter Kers.
Benjamin Bratton at Sonic Acts Festival 2015. Photo Pieter Kers.
Graham Harman and Mark Williams at Sonic Acts Festival 2015. Photo by Pieter Kers.