Sonic Acts

Have you been listening to Sonic Acts Radio? If so, we have a few questions for you! As we rethink ways of exhibiting soundworks and continue our research into experimental listening practices, we’re counting on your valuable input. Fill out our survey for a chance to win a publication or release from the Sonic Acts webshop. Opt in to share extra thoughts in a short interview, and more prizes await!

Head to https://radio.sonicacts.com 🔴

Sonic Acts Radio is an immersive online broadcasting experience, playing out three-dimensional, spatialised soundscapes. Just plug in your headphones to tune in anytime, anywhere! Discover iconic archival works by Annea Lockwood, Hildegard Westerkamp, Jana Winderen, and BJ Nilsen, alongside newly commissioned tracks by Anna Khvyl, Atte Elias Kantonen, Geneva Skeen, KMRU, Mint Park, Felicity Mangan, and Slikback.

Spatial Sound Platform is supported by Cultuurloket DigitALL (), Provincie Noord-Holland (), and Gravin van Bylandt Stichting.

This weekend was memorable in many ways. After our two-day Symposium at Stedelijk Museum, the festive club night at Garage Noord, the ‘Expanded Experience’ concert night at Muziekgebouw that blew us all away, and the hypnotic twelve-hour spectacle ‘TRANCE’, we look back at our new-found sonic encounters in awe.

The Sonic Acts Biennial continues with next weekend’s highlight, ‘Michel Waisvisz: Touched by Sound’ with Tarek Atoui at BIMHUIS. Various manifestations at Zone2Source, W139 and Looiersgracht 60 are still open to visit.

💚 Tickets and the entire programme are available via: https://2024.sonicacts.com/programme

📸: Pierre Zylstra and Pieter Kers

The first tickets for our 30th Anniversary Edition of the Sonic Acts Biennial are live 🚨

Make sure to be part of our many exhibitions, club events, workshops, and immersive theatre productions by getting your tickets now. From 2 February to 24 March, the Biennial with the theme ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ takes over the city of Amsterdam, one interdisciplinary art form at a time.

Be a part of our magical ride that pushes boundaries and new art forms by hitting the link: 2024.sonicacts.com/tickets

Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 is generously supported by: Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, het Cultuurfonds, Mondriaan Fonds, Fonds Podiumkunsten, Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie, Provincie Noord-Holland, Fonds 21, Re-Imagine Europe, Cultuurloket DigitALL, Hartwig Art Foundation

Are you interested in technology, art, new media or electronic music? Would you like to help make Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 a reality?

From 2 February to 24 March we will be hosting a forward-thinking art Biennial with an event programme made up of exhibitions, performances, club nights, symposiums, film screenings, workshops, and more.

→ register by Thursday 30 Nov: https://bit.ly/SAB24volunteer

Volunteers can work in a range of roles, from hosting and door management, to catering and hospitality, to production. This is a unique opportunity to learn about the backstage management of a large cultural event and to get to know the Sonic Acts team.

Becoming a volunteer gives you access to exciting venues, a range of experiences, and connects you with a community dedicated to fostering exciting new thinking and art. Volunteers also receive a Sonic Acts goodie bag and catered meals during their shifts.

The 30th anniversary edition of SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2024: THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS runs from 2 February to 24 March, with an intensive and celebratory festival weekend taking place from 23 to 25 February.

Individual events and artists will be unveiled in the upcoming weeks – stay tuned for announcements!

→ 2024.sonicacts.com
→ Subscribe to the Sonic Acts newsletter: eepurl.com/tA1fj

Inspired by David Abram’s eponymous 1996 book, the programme explores the web of relations experienced through the ‘sensuous body’, evoking our rootedness in the larger ecology of earth beings.

Unfolding over two months, the Biennial takes shape as an exhibition, a multichannel sound programme, club nights, large theatrical productions, a symposium, film screenings, immersive installations, sound and field walks, workshops and more. The events are staged across multiple Amsterdam venues, including Paradiso, Muziekgebouw, Eye Filmmuseum, W139, Zone2Source, Oude Kerk, Looiersgracht 60, Stedelijk Museum, Garage Noord and kanaal40, with many more locations to be announced.

The Spell of the Sensuous’ visual identity pays homage to the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. The AI generated visuals channel her distinctive palette – the mystical entrancement of her painted landscapes or the liquid interconnectedness of (non)beings.

Sonic Acts Press sale ends on Monday! Select print matter and audio releases are available at a discount, ranging from the most recent edition of Ecoes mag, to coveted material from the archive.

→ head to https://shop.sonicacts.com/product-category/sale/

La notte di Sonic Acts. Tra mondi di luce virtuale e club music decostruita: 20 ottobre, La Biennale Musica 2023 Collaborazione proteiforme quella tra La Biennale Musica e Sonic Acts Amsterdam, l'organizzazione che dal 1994, con festival e progetti, ha rappresentato uno dei monitor principali dell'

'I’m interested in different states of being and transitions between them. When you wake up, there’s a transition between one state and another. Then you drink a cup of coffee, and you’re suddenly sharp as a knife. My work takes the research of those states of being and the transitions between them as a starting point.'

In an interview for the latest issue of Ecoes magazine, Dutch artist Philip Vermeulen talks to Arie Altena about his large-scale installations 'Boem BOem' for Museum Voorlinden and the Sonic Acts commission 'More Moiré'. Now available to read online, the conversation explores topics including psychoacoustics, installations as instruments, and the 'sweet spots' of perception.

→ Read in full at bit.ly/3rqfjIx🎾

→ Celebrate the launch of Ecoes #5 this Thursday at San Serriffe 🥂

Ecoes is a periodic journal from Sonic Acts Press, focusing on art in the age of pollution. A portmanteau of ‘ecology’ and ‘echoes’, the magazine showcases compelling artistic and critical perspectives that engage with the pasts and afterlives of environmental harm, toxicity, extraction, and waste.

📸 Julia Schmitz

Speaking in conversation with Hannah Pezzack for our latest issue of Ecoes magazine, director of the Swiss Institute in New York, Stefanie Hessler, discusses her three exhibitions and publications – ‘Tidalectics’, ‘Prospecting Ocean’ and ‘Sex Ecologies’ – and explains the ‘oceanic feeling’ that flows through her curatorial work with artists.

→ Grab your copy of Ecoes at: shop.sonicacts.com

In our most recent episode of the Overexposed Podcast, made in collaboration with Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, Arif Kornweitz speaks with artist duo lucky dragons, discussing collaborative networks, hydrofeminism and experiences of crip-time during cancer treatment in their multichannel artwork Sentences About Rivers and Cancers.

In this site-specific installation commissioned for Sonic Acts Biennial 2022, a series of tactile transducers were positioned along Amstelpark’s Rode Brug, creating a flow of spoken and sung stories as listeners crossed from one side of the river to the other.

→ Listen to the Overexposed Podcast: bit.ly/3XAjDB3 🔉
→ Explore lucky dragon’s commission: bit.ly/3pxXirj 🦀

Design by Toni Brell

Announcing Sonic Acts' collaboration with La Biennale di Venezia: Anthea Caddy and Marcin Pietruszewski’s ‘Love Numbers’, a newly co-commissioned sound installation, and ‘La notte di Sonic Acts’, an afterhours programme of live performances and DJ sets.

*16–29 October*
Designed for cello, synthetic sound and parabolic loudspeakers, 'Love Numbers' explores cosmological forces of the Sun and Moon that form multiple opposing thermal and gravitational pulls in the Earth’s atmosphere. The installation piece gets its name from a set of parameters introduced in 1909 by English mathematician Augustus Love, used to identify the overall elastic response of the Earth to the tides.

*20 October*
Also taking place at Teatro alle Tese, ‘La notte di Sonic Acts’ features live performances by aya x MFO, Emme, S280F, Yen Tech, alongside DJ sets by Soft Break and snufkin. With immersive light and space design by visual artist Theresa Baumgartner.

→ tickets & info available at: www.labiennale.org/en/music/2023

We are looking for a new Operations Manager for 3 to 4 days a week!

→ Apply on Homerun: https://sonicacts.homerun.co/operationeel-manager

As Operations Manager you are at the heart of the organisation. Together with the director, you translate Sonic Acts' strategy and policy into concrete aims and are responsible for their implementation. In collaboration with the team, you help coordinate the internal structure of Sonic Acts and are responsible for recruitment + other HR matters.

The ideal candidate wants to help develop art and culture, has at least 2 years experience working for a cultural organisation, communicates well in both Dutch and English, and lives in Amsterdam or the regional area.

Thank you to everyone who travelled to Ruigoord for Maritime Frictions last week! It was such a beautiful day to celebrate spring, Sonic Acts' collaboration with FieldARTS, and, especially, to think field-based artistic research together, situating ourselves critically within watery, infrastructural landscapes.

→ The event photos are now available on Flickr here: https://www.flickr.com/sonicacts

More highlights & recordings coming soon

Maritime Frictions included field presentations from Harpo ’t Hart and Frank Bloem (Embassy of the North Sea), a listening walk with Lance Laoyan, talks by Fred Carter and Charmaine Chua, a performance lecture by Liquid Time (Jacob Bolton and Miriam Matthiessen), a screening of Michaela Büsse’s ‘Building with Nature’ (2022), a sound performance from Velma Spell, ending with Nessim's DJ set.

Liquid Time’s lecture performance 'Roadstead, Sea Lock, Deepwater Port' speculates on logistics as a project of time management: process of distributing, expropriating and configuring planetary time.

Based on field research carried out in the IJ estuary to the west of Amsterdam, Jacob Bolton and Miriam Matthiessen map out three sites throughout time that each, in their own way, encapsulated enact a particular temporal dynamic within maritime space: from the harbour that shielded Dutch East India Company ships from storms in the sixteenth century, to the newly opened Sea Lock – the largest moving metal structure in the world – designed to allow mega ships to enter Amsterdam.

The studies of these sites are specific to this estuary, and to particular points in history. But in logistics nothing is isolated, no site is specific. These sites exceed their specific time and space: they act as lenses to look at the temporality of capital more broadly, or can be understood as temporal and spatial archetypes found in ports all over the world.

Along the way, Liquid Time charts the oceanic and anthropogenic rhythms that form each location, the building blocks of what they call the ‘infrarhythm’ of logistics. Over time, the music changes – from galleons bound for the colonies to the mega ships of today – but the song remains the same.

Friday 19 May at Ruigoord: https://bit.ly/3ViPcOU

→ A few tickets are still available! Don't forget to book dinner too, taking place from 17:15 to 18:30

🌀 ⏳ 💦

We are thrilled to be screening 'Building with Nature' (2022) by Michaela Büsse this Friday night at Ruigoord. The short film is an outcome of six years research and aesthetic explorations at the Zandmotor (literally 'sand motor') off the coast of The Hague, as well as at the Dutch Delta Institute, Deltares.

Many of the world’s beaches are created and maintained through regular coastal replenishment. Rising sea levels, coastal erosion, and ground subsidence threaten the existence of beaches and lead to ever more costly and comprehensive interventions. In the Netherlands, researchers and engineers are experimenting with novel building methods that reduce the frequency of replenishment while creating genuine coastal landscapes. The dynamic modelling approach that was established to this end allows scientists to approximate the behaviour of large quantities of sand over a period of 20 years or more.

‘Building with Nature' addresses the development of this model and its application, augmenting both the Zandmotor and Deltares with satellite imagery and artistic renderings of scientific data gathered on-site. Oscillating between virtual environment and actual landscape, the work elaborates on the recursive relationship between model and site, and what it means to build (with) nature.

→ Explore the full Maritime Frictions programme: https://sonicacts.com/agenda/maritime-frictions

On Friday 19 May from 16:00, sound artist and researcher Lance Gapuz Laoyan guides a listening intervention that takes you through the industrious landscapes of Ruigoord. Through poetry and deep listening Laoyan attempts to tap into imaginary worlds of what was and could be within the watery surroundings of Afrikahaven.

→ €5 entry for the full Maritime Frictions event! €15 if you join us for dinner: https://bit.ly/3ViPcOU

Out of reach but in sight, the industries that exist around the small village of Ruigoord contain an array of raw and processed materials such as oil, petroleum, coal and other items related to maritime cargo. The importance of the waterways that surround Ruigoord make the possibility of these materials to exist here, the streams of water aiding the flow of logistics. What are these streams of water telling us? Where have they travelled from? What lies beneath the surface?

→ Find out more about Lance Gapuz Laoyan at https://sonicacts.com/community/lance-laoyan

Some entries in our newly published Field Docket detail the vital role and poetic teachings of flora growing by the North Sea. In this small book, we get better aquainted with zeealsem (wormwood), zeekraal (glassworts), and sea rocket, whose deep roots carry nutrients and hold together dunes. At the turn of a page we also meet a little kelp knot. Called a ‘holdfast’, this root-like structure will tangle itself into an anchor when it cannot attach to a surface.

In July 2022, two dozen artists and researchers embarked on fieldwork across the logistical flows of the Amsterdam port, the brackish waters of the IJmuiden estuary, and the shifting dunes of Texel Island. Published by Sonic Acts Press, the Field Docket details their encounters and adventures in transitional waters.

→ Order a copy (€5) now via https://shop.sonicacts.com/product/field-docket/ or pick one up during Maritime Frictions on Friday 19 May at Ruigoord, a unique event organised with FieldARTS ✨

We are delighted to welcome Charmaine Chua for Maritime Frictions' keynote lecture on Friday 19 May at Ruigoord

Charmaine Chua is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their scholarly and political work focuses on racial capitalism, the politics of global circulation and infrastructure, and terrains of internationalist struggle under U.S. empire.

→ Register: https://bit.ly/3ViPcOU (€5 or €15 with dinner)

The rise of the global logistics industry has fundamentally reshaped global supply chains by organising goods movement through a politics of just-in-time circulation. Paying attention to debates over anti-colonial economic policy as well as accounts of social rebellion and unrest in ports and along the supply chain, Chua argues that logistics may be understood as an active experiment by transnational elites to make the oceans safe for the free flow of commerce, producing movements for economic self-determination as a disruption of the global economy’s healthy circulation.

As such, studying logistics from the "Third World' illuminates that contemporary supply chains are not only concerned with the efficient transport of commodities, but about a demand for social, political, and bodily access to the labour, resources, and geostrategic locations of Asia.

Charmaine Chua has delivered public lectures internationally as far as London, Singapore, Berlin, Thessaloniki, and across the US, along with works published in an array of periodicals. They have two books forthcoming: ’How to Beat Amazon: The Struggle of America's New Working Class’ (with Spencer Cox), and ’Fast Circulation, Slow Violence: Logistical Counterrevolution and the Transpacific Empire of Distribution’.

We have two vacancies on our Communications & Marketing team!

• Department head: leads the communications team to amplify the visibility and reach of Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 — establishing a strategy for communicating and promoting the programme, its online and offline identity, and overseeing audience and partner relationships.

• Manager: a key part of the team responsible for communicating and promoting the Sonic Acts Biennial, working on online and offline communication campaigns, and managing relationships with media partners and audiences.

→ Find out more at https://sonicacts.homerun.co/

What does it mean to sense air physically, as well as emotionally, culturally, poetically? Now available in full via YouTube, watch back Nerea Calvillo's lecture from Sonic Acts Biennial, which took place at Leaving Traces on 15 October 2022. The opening talk of the symposium invites us to think infrastructure otherwise.

Focusing on how geoengineering projects sustain a state of affairs, Calvillo investigates infrastructures designed to deal with polluted air, testing how other modes of paying attention might acknowledge the broken world and trigger other ways of living in it.

→ Watch now: https://youtu.be/R-cA4x8BkHw and stay tuned! We will be highlighting more talks from the Leaving Traces symposium in the coming weeks 🎥

Nerea Calvillo – Sensing Polluted Airs Sensing Polluted Airs by Nerea CalvilloSONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 202215 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The NetherlandsGeoengineering projects sustain a state...

Maritime Frictions lineup and tickets are here! On 19 May from 16:00 to midnight, join us and FieldARTS at Ruigoord for a listening session, dinner, talks, film screening, experimental sound art and roiling DJ set. Drawing together artistic and critical practices from artists and researchers including FRED CARTER, CHARMAINE CHUA, LIQUID TIME (Jacob Bolton and Miriam Matthiessen), MICHAELA BÜSSE, LANCE LAOYAN, VELMA SPELL and SNUFKIN, this event presents a grounded and briny encounter with infrastructure central to the global trade of raw materials and ongoing environmental injustice.

→ Tickets cost €5 or €15 including dinner via https://bit.ly/3ViPcOU

The Field Docket is now available to pre-order!

In July 2022, two dozen artists and researchers embarked on fieldwork across the logistical flows of the Amsterdam port, the brackish waters of the IJmuiden estuary, and the shifting dunes of Texel Island in dialogue with marine chemists, Marxist theorists, Black feminist thinkers, and benthic ecologists. This research was conducted with the conviction that fieldwork might name an intimacy with the field and those drawn to it, not the variously distilled outcomes that typically follow once the sand bank is translated as a bank of data.

Published by Sonic Acts Press for FieldARTS, this pocket-sized book details some thirty entries for thought and practice encountered in the plural currents, contours and conflicts of the field. Provisional, excessive, dialogic and often brackish, the Field Docket presents a critical engagement with a field languishing at the edge of cultural concern while central to the shape of coming transitions that are already well underway.

→ Pre-order the Field Docket now from shop.sonicacts.com, orders ship out in early May ✉️

→ Copies will also be available at our merch table during Maritime Frictions on 19 May at Ruigoord, an event co-organised with FieldARTS 🗓️

This publication is made possible by Creative Industries Fund NL, Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, as well as New Perspectives for Action – a project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union

Join the team! Sonic Acts is looking for new interns 📡

We are seeking two new interns to support our production and marketing & communications teams for 4 days a week from October 2023 until the end of April 2024.

→ Apply before 1 May via homerun: http://bit.ly/3nN6y9G