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The geologic imagination
The last edition of “Sonic Acts” focused on the Anthropocene: that period in the life of our planet featuring an illustrious parasite – humankind – and its impact on what is a global scale.
A paradox in the title of this year’s Sonic Acts gives an insight into its ambitious objectives – and immediately ticks off one of them: to captivate us.
For just over 20 years, this festival has been making a name for itself on the Amsterdam cultural scene. Based on the now legitimised convergences of art and music, and art and science, it also injects a far from predictable touch of warmth and subtlety – needed, I would add, to channel the necessary mystery. The subject is, after all, the Anthropocene: that period in the life of our planet featuring an illustrious parasite – humankind – and its impact on what is a global scale: not easy to conceive, therefore, not just for its geographic enormity.
Sonic Acts, manifesto del festival
A busy four days were scheduled (26 February – 1 March) but for a thorough grasp of the core theme we should start from the speakers in the main space of the renowned Paradiso venue (a 19th-century church that is now one of the city’s most popular clubs). Firstly, two key figures – the geologist and the artist – are a must if we wish to speak of geologic imagination and there were predictably also many slides packed with bullet points and plenty of maps (some not easy to read) as too extracts from video-installations and photographic performance records. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), the scientists often showed greater communicational skills than the artists.
Sonic Acts at Paradiso, Sonic Acts Festival 2015, The Geologic Imagination. John Foxx & Steve D'Agostino feat. Karborn, Saturday 28 February 2015. Photo Pieter Kers
The environmental issue – with its geopolitical repercussions – was, of course, a major focus. On Friday, the geologist Michael Welland spoke of the Anthropocene’s huge influence on the natural flow of sediments towards the sea, especially as a result of dam-construction and “sand mining”, a not very sustainable and frequently illegal practice that has grown dramatically following the building boom in China and hugely costly projects such as the Dubai Palms in the Emirates. On Saturday, Benjamin H. Bratton painted an even more sinister picture. This professor from the University of California San Diego vividly described the overlap between infrastructures that collect, monitor and analyse data provided by private companies and government decisional processes. Technology and geopolitics become inextricably enmeshed in this “stack”: the very material worth of minerals extracted in the Congo is key to the manufacture of our smartphone screens but they are then dumped nearby when they become waste.
Opening Sonic Acts Festival 2015, The Geologic Imagination, Thursday 26 February 2015. Skype lecture Reza Negarestani. Photo Pieter Kers
As is only to be expected from a festival that places an interdisciplinary approach at its core, some of the significant examples were, indeed, those on the boundary between economy and design, art and environmental safety. Rob Holmes, founder of the mammoth blog and Dredge Research Collaborative, illustrated some examples of what he calls the “prosthetic littoral”: cases in which, rather than being destructive, interventions such as dredging have offered an opportunity to recreate coastal profiles eroded by unfavourable conditions. In the case of Jamaica Bay in New York, the reconstitution of an archipelago become a semi-marshland was made possible thanks to the sand dredged when expanding the city port (prompted, in turn, by the expansion of the Panama Canal which resulted in bigger container ships).
Sonic Acts Fieldtrip, Sonic Acts Festival 2015, The Geologic Imagination. Raviv Ganchrow, Long Wave Synthesis. Photo Pieter Kers
Another interesting presentation came from the curator and researcher Ele Carpenter, who focused on the nuclear culture and, among other things, showed photographs of fascinating field trips made by artists to nuclear-waste sites in France and Japan to reflect aesthetically on their meaning and relationship with the community. This creative curiosity directed at controversial but essentially banal phenomena (the management of toxic waste is a process on which our lifestyle has relied for a long time and will continue to do so) can be considered the cipher of this year’s festival – there may not be a solution to the changes but let there, at least, be a geologic imagination.
Sonic Acts Fieldtrip, Sonic Acts Festival 2015, The Geologic Imagination. Raviv Ganchrow, Long Wave Synthesis. Photo Pieter Kers
Aesthetically speaking, sound and landscape were the two cardinal points. The former abstract and discordant; the latter nearly always seen from above (a perspective that, in this case, seems the only one possible, thanks partly to the ubiquity of Google Earth and drones in the contemporary imagination). As well as installations at the Stedelijk museum, the unfailing “sonic acts” were consumed in the metaphysical architecture of the Muziekgebouw Ann Het Ij and the already mentioned Paradiso venue. Accompanied by hypnotic visuals based on both films and purely digital effects, performances by artists such as BJ Nielsen & Karl Lemieux, Herman Kolgen and Murcof con Rod Maclachlan turned the main hall of the Muziekgebouw into a window on a rocky and vaguely alien landscape, observed in contemplation by the audience from the privileged location of a mound of bean bags. The mood was more psychedelic the following evening at the Paradiso, particularly so in the popular live performance by Jaki Liebezeit and Burnt Friedman, followed by Australian desert landscapes filmed (and experienced) by Robert Curgenven.
Opening Sonic Acts Festival 2015, The Geologic Imagination, Thursday 26 February 2015. Espen Sommer Eide. Photo Pieter Kers
The most telling synthesis of The Geologic Imagination was, perhaps, a land-art installation by Raviv Ganchrow. Situated in the port of Amsterdam, in an isolated and damp location in the environs of Sloterdijk, the work could only be reached by bus. Long Wave Synthesis (2015) consists in red containers inside which the artist placed long-wave sound generators (mostly frequencies below human hearing capacity, between 4 and 30hz) to create a sound topography superimposed on that of its location. The result is a monumental half-industrial and half-Minimalist sculpture that vibrates forcefully; a landscape that becomes the source of sound while the sound itself becomes a form of landscape. It is precisely the seemingly contradictory equilibrium between these visible and invisible/inaudible elements that makes it work. A captivated crowd gathered around containers vibrating on the muddy grass: this is geologic imagination.
