Sonic Urbanism: The Political Voice

About

LIVE PROGRAMME

Wednesday, November 18

7–7.15pm GMT Performance by The International Western | Canary 
Directed by Denna Cartamkhoob

Until 1986 we carried caged canaries down British coal mines to detect carbon monoxide before our delayed human reaction. In 1986 a crowd of protestors interrupted the conference announcing the development of Canary Wharf by freeing sheep and bees into the landscape. They shouted ‘kill the canary!’, but only canaries could have saved us: living signalling systems, a sentinel species sacrificed to warn us of the danger ahead. Now when we need it more than ever, is the canary dead already? Or is it singing otherwise, as a sign, a gift of grace time in the city? Time enough now to escape, move, abandon tools, halt work; to make the air safe enough to return.

The International Western and company is a performance collective based in London, working together since 2012, making installation and performance work about the technosocial mechanisms of contemporary living. 

7.15–7.30pm GMT Performance by Eleni Ikoniadou | Polyphonic Lament

“One has to inhabit the crazy, nonsensical, ranting language of the other. Inhabit and even cultivate this absence” (Fred Moten). This audiovisual performance is a chorus of human, nonhuman, computational, sonic and bodily voices, coming together to compose a non-linear collective lament.

Eleni Ikoniadou is Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art and member of the art collective AUDINT (audint.net). With Steve Goodman (kode9) and Toby Heys, she has co-edited the volume Unsound: Undead (Urbanomic, 2019) and produced a series of exhibitions under the same title, funded by the Arts Council of England (2018-2020). Currently she is working on a fully funded project by the Human-Data Interaction EPSRC Network, investigating machine learning in Art, Music & the Culture Industries. She is founder and co-editor of the Media Philosophy Series (Rowman and Littlefield International) and author of the monograph The Rhythmic Event: Art, Media and the Sonic (The MIT Press, 2014).

Thursday, November 19

7–8pm GMT Join publication contributors Eleni Ikoniadou, performer and sound artist Ella Finer, Theatrum Mundi’s John Bingham-Hall and &beyond’s George Kafka for a multi-disciplinary conversation on how the voice is produced, amplified, shared and heard in contemporary cities. 

8–9pm GMT London based DJ, artist, and vocalist, Shannen SP, known for her work with esteemed UK label Hyperdub, and her co-curation of the Ø event with Kode9, will be responding to the theme of the ‘political voice’ through a DJ set dedicated to emergent gqom, kuduro, batida and UK rap. Shannen SP is also a member of the Nine Nights collective, started during the UK’s Covid-19 lockdown amid the global wave of protests that followed the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. So far they have orchestrated a series of live streams exploring blackness in its different forms in London and Berlin, featuring DJ Stingray, Flohio, Obongjayer and more.