Sound, Language & Position with AGF

Workshop dates: 17/05/2021 - 2021-08-31
    
Listening is a practice - it is a political act. Sound is a way of knowing the world; a way of orienting ourselves, of expressing, understanding and contextualising our position. We can use sound to make connections, to grow decentralized networks, to organise. The possibilities of language - political language, deconstructed language, poetic language - to organise these networks and connections is intensely powerful and nuanced. What is political sound? Or collective sound? Does it have a transformative quality? How can we make sound together, and decolonize our practice as an individualistic form of expression? What technology can we involve, develop or hack? 

And, as we explore these networks, there are important ethical considerations. What is the relationship between the recorder and recorded? Do I have consent? Is it my place to tell this story?

This workshop will focus on each participant working to develop their perspective on three elements: sound, language and position. Each session will develop from the presentation of new ideas through to a set of directions, and assignments for the next session. There will be face-to-face meetings and group listening, as we manouvre towards the production of a short-form audio work for presentation on recon (https://rec-on.org)

Antye Greie (aka AGF) is an East-German artist and producer living on Hailuoto Island, Finland. She assumes a multiplicity of facets and roles – sound sculptor, poet, composer, gender activist, sound and new media curator. Her experimental music, without completely leaving the dance floor, proves hard to label. Her sounds at times echo musique concrète, other times glitch or noise, alluding to icons like Björk or Laurie Anderson. In spite of her clear poetic tendencies, language requently disappears in her work, drawing the human voice into a game with pure tonalities, beyond worn out recognizable speech. Ambient sounds, synthesized voices, dissonant malfunction warnings drain into the atonal river of post-digital aesthetics.

Having participated in Documenta 14 and Transmediale and received an award at the Ars Electronica festival (2014), Antye Greie is a complex artist whose praxis, though socio-politically laden, goes beyond mere ideology. Her fluctuating, modulating identity composes and recomposes itself from samples, comments, likes, and photos on Facebook, Mixcloud tracks, bytes circulating at dizzying speeds, always one step ahead of the newest control tech.

Antye's installation "Mycelium" - in which mushrooms generate sound, composing music in real time - ties into a larger project entitled (sonic) Wild Code, in which AGF and a group of artists, anthropologists, and computer scientists construct music from the audio feedback caused by rocks, wind, plants, streams, and a metal reindeer fence. These experiences in hybrid ecology were commented on by the artist in a text which recently came out in Musical Instruments in the 21st Century (Springer, 2017), a volume with theoretical underpinnings, broadly, in Deleuze’s theory of assemblages, of hierarchy dissolution, and free, rhizomatic relations.

Antye is an active member of the female:pressure community, and has militated for Kurdish and Syrian women and for the visibility of female electronic music artists and producers, actions echoed in the recent tendencies of Romania’s art paradigm (see Bucharest’s party scene and collectives like Vagenta and Corp). Her discourse aims at promoting equality of opportunity and diversity on the electronic music scene, interweaving power, responsibility and aesthetics.

(Image of Antye by Inkeri Jantti)