openwork

Spaceshifting

Gray — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The ontological violence of being confined to categories of the Inhuman (especially the “Animal”) is often resisted by appealing to acceptance into “common humanity,” a desire to be recognized as "human,” validating and working within this category. Through the creation of this exploratory, sticky, tangled website, I construct emerging connections and contrasts in BIBI's "Animal Farm" (가면무도회), INIKO's "Jericho," Rina Sawayama's "XS," and horsegiirL's "f0rbiidden l0ve$tory," and the ways each project occupies and employs the Inhuman, interrogating and challenging appeals to acceptance and expansion in the category of the “human.” These projects are created by artists who themselves are subjected to historic and present processes of de"human”ization, warping and transforming their own physical matter, as well as transgressing space and time around them—visibly, lyrically, audibly—through embracing and inhabiting Inhumanity as robot/cyborg, alien, monster, and/or nonhuman animal(s). Through this website, I tear open questions of racialized, gendered violence and "survivor"-hood; capitalist excess, co-optation, and consumption; and other interconnected, overlapping layers of violence of fixed and fixing notions of “the Human.” I additionally question the limitations of these projects, exposing contradiction and tension, as well as asking what is at stake in Inhumanity—and what this means in immediate organizing and resistance work.

Notes on Contributor:

Gray is a multi-disciplinary artist making multimedia pieces often exploring—but not limited to—sonic analyses. Gray's research often reflects on soundscapes as ontology in practice, as well as the relationships that can result from these practices. Outside of their art-work, Gray spends time community organizing.

Pshal P’shaw

Victoria Keddie — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Pshal P’shaw investigates the sonic instability of speech—where phonetic dissonance, vocal fragmentation, and gestural sound challenge structured linguistic norms. Developed during my residency at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, this work explores how speech patterns morph in response to unfamiliar dialects, sonic environments, and computational intervention. Inspired by Hermann Finsterlin’s fluid, dimensionally unbound architectural forms, I approach language as an unfixed structure, revealing phonetic articulation's unstable, adaptive nature.

At its core, Pshal P’shaw is a multi-channel sculptural sound installation, neural instrument, and experimental phonetic composition that deconstructs oral adaptation and linguistic convergence. The project is based on 28 recorded voices engaging with a script designed to test the phonetic contours of a contemporary US Western dialect. Participants articulated words in controlled EEG lab settings, allowing for an analysis of phonetic deviation, mimicry, and emergent vocal patterns.

I collaborated with Cornelius Abel, the Head of the EEG laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, to create a participant-based study. This study focuses on neural responses to phonetic adaptation and linguistic instability. It examines how the brain processes disrupted phonetics, prosodic shifts, and unfamiliar articulatory patterns, providing insights into cognitive processing beyond structured linguistic norms.

By positioning phonetic instability as an expressive and cognitive site, this work aligns with my broader research on interstitial sonic spaces—the liminal areas between signal and noise, order and disruption, articulation and abstraction. The project extends into machine learning and human-machine interaction, where a neural algorithm dissects and reorganizes speech based on phonetic similarity and difference. The system works within a granular information base of over 3,000 phonetic variations, revealing the rhythmic, percussive, and spectral structures embedded in vocal articulation.

Working with designer and Max/MSP specialist Matthew Ostrowski, I developed a custom Max/MSP script to explore how an AI-driven phonetic instrument can exist in a wandering state rather than optimization. Through sessions envisioning a system that resists linear progression, we designed a model that moves fluidly between pattern recognition and deviation, continually reorienting itself within the dataset rather than seeking a fixed resolution. This keeps the AI suspended in a process of recombination, allowing for unexpected phonetic proximities, spectral collisions, and recursive vocal transformations.

The work employs Flucoma and MUBI as Max/MSP patches for phonetic and vocal analysis, mapping articulatory gestures through spectral decomposition, transient detection, and dynamic filtering. The script was developed in MATLAB by the EEG labs, enabling phonetic feature extraction and computational manipulation. A 12-channel sculptural sound installation hosts the generative algorithm, continuously reshaping the recordings based on vocal proximity and divergence. Simultaneously, a 5-channel raster video system maps the frequency data of each voice onto facial deconstructions, amplifying the inherent instability of articulation.

A special edition record release with an accompanying booklet is available through Raster Media (Germany). This vinyl expands the project’s inquiries into a fixed yet fragmented format, extending the phonetic research into a sonic document. Side A, “Transients Script,” isolates the percussive elements of speech, revealing the microtonal instability of articulation as a rhythmic force. Side B examines spectral interplay across the 28 voices, exposing harmonic shifts, tonal variances, and dynamic resonances.

Pshal P’shaw interrogates how language operates beyond fixed linguistic hierarchies, where vocal adaptation and sonic fragmentation become sites of expanded meaning-making by engaging with phonetic mimicry, algorithmic processing, and embodied sound. In doing so, the work contributes to larger conversations in experimental phonetics, accessibility in assistive sound technologies, and the role of noise in cognitive and communicative systems. Through historical research (on linguistic shifts in 19th-century US boomtowns) and contemporary computational modeling, this project reimagines how phonetic structures evolve, break apart, and reform—not as errors but as integral components of human interaction and cognition.

Notes on Contributor

Victoria Keddie is an artist whose work explores sound beyond structured language, investigating how communication fractures and reconstitutes through error, interference, and technological mediation. She has been Co-Director of E.S.P. TV for over a decade, using televisual media for performance. Her work has been performed and exhibited internationally, with recent fellowships at the NYSCA/NYFA, the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Elektronmusikstudion, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Keddie’s video works are distributed by Lightcone (FR) and The Filmmakers Co-op (US), and her sound works are released with Raster Media (DE), Chaikin Records (US), and Fridman Gallery (NYC/US).

The Magical Slickness of the Myth of Black Oil, Movement Suite

Jordan Deal — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Magical Slickness of the Myth of Black Oil, Movement Suite explores the subversive and disruptive slick nature of a concept I am developing called chaos force. The three-piece Movement Suite consists of a short written poetic manifesto contextualizing the current of chaos force as it exists in black sonic temporality as the first movement, then transitioning into a recorded two movement sound piece that spans 20 min.

I have been exploring mythbuilding & worldbuilding, memory, rhythmanalysis, and vocal & movement-based improvisation as a generative tool to harness and disperse a concept which I call chaos force. Chaos force is a current which sits between two polarized magnetic forces and propels matter outside of its orbit, into the void, towards endless potentiality. This current can then be transformed into subversive material which problematizes, interrogates, and disrupts duality and oppositionality. Within this black sonic temporal performance, I use amorphous structure and improvisation to imagine anti-colonial post-modern sonic futures integrated into worldbuilding, social refusal, and political fugitivity.

The sound piece is loosely devised for piano, voice, and synth, with the addition of horn and percussion as the third instigating force. This work aims to actively create, swallow, and destroy structure in real-time using both contradiction in rhythm and harmony, counter-force, and spontaneity. Spirit inhabits this sonic world and speaks in tongue–devouring at its own pleasure and desire. Its landscape is both a love poem for the black imagination, a travel through planetary orbits, and sex with the slickness of oil.

Notes on Contributor

Jordan Deal (they/them) is a Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary artist whose work defies conventional boundaries. Using their body as a conduit, Deal navigates the intersections of performance, sound, and film to explore the forces that shape socio-political structures and mythologies.

Deal has presented performance work internationally, such as at Radialsystem (Berlin) as part of CTM Festival, Cafe OTO (London), ZDB (Lisbon), Performing Arts Forum (France), Performance Mix Festival (NYC), Judson Memorial Church (NYC), and Icebox Project Space (Philadelphia), amongst others. They have exhibited sculptural and sonic installations throughout Philadelphia and New York and have recently been selected as a 2023-2024 Artistic Fellow at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. They are currently a 2024 recipient of the MAPFund Grant.

Deal recently released their new full LP titled Seas of Triple Consciousness with London-based record label Horn of Plenty Records this past September.

What Remains

Gauri Bahuguna — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The second thing they tell you at a vicarious trauma workshop is to turn the audio off while watching the videos. The first thing is to not try to be a hero, and the more content you stoically expose yourself to the more insidiously it will take root. Of course I was too arrogant to listen. Spent hours at work combing through graphic material, listening to every gunshot and scream. Over and over again. I became more withdrawn, cried privately. Over and over again. The visuals are haunting, but they fade eventually. The sounds are ghosts that still live with me.

I used science to intellectualize my troubles. I researched the relationship between sound and memory, a lot of papers about remembering patterns. I researched the relationship between sound and violence, a lot of papers about vets and PTSD. I researched the relationship between violence and memory, a lot of papers about mice and their cortisol levels. And while I now understand why I get auditory hallucinations, I don’t know how to get rid of them.

So now, I use art to romanticize my deteriorating mental health. I journaled to log my thoughts, nagging daydreams, and irrepressible emotions. I want to share a translation of these ramblings, three poems expressed in video. The result is a collage of open-source video, 3D models, and diegetic sound; a quick peek into my quotidian, a chaotic tour through the real, unreal, and ultrareal.

Notes on Contributor

Gauri Bahuguna is a computational designer and researcher dedicated to exploring intersections of art, human rights, and emerging technologies. With over five years of experience investigating complex human rights cases, Gauri has collaborated with practitioners across the domains of advocacy, law, and art to create compelling narratives that are accessible to wider audiences.

As Deputy Director and Senior Researcher at SITU Research, she has led investigations into human rights violations in Sudan, surveillance along the U.S. Southern Border, and short form films for the UN mapping evidence of ISIL’s crimes in Iraq. She has also served as a researcher and curatorial adviser on “Patterns of Life” a collaboration with artist Mona Chalabi for the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. Additionally, Gauri has taught electives like “Spaces of Accountability / Models of Justice” and studios at the Cooper Union School of Art, given lectures at Carnegie Mellon, NYU, The New School, and participated in the inaugural Biennale College Architettura in Venice, 2023.

Out of Baghdad!: Negotiating Loss, Longing, and Belonging in Aida Nadeem’s Work of the Iraqi Musical Avant-Garde

Leahley Alawi — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 2005, Aida Nadeem produced Out of Baghdad!, a conglomeration of traditional Iraqi instrumentation, audio collection, and experimental vocalization. Nadeem’s work is described as rejecting the restrictions of western ideas of modernity, by utilizing traditional elements in a more contemporary framework. Produced in the aftermath of the 2003 United States-led invasion of Iraq, Nadeem’s work provides the central focus of this paper.

Constructing this paper as an intimate ethnography, the author utilizes personal interviews with close family members who grew up in Iraq to contextualize and ground Nadeem’s compositions, and they are used as a foundation for analysis of Nadeem’s music as being composed within the diaspora. This allows for a more fruitful analysis of how Nadeem’s work utilizes symbols central to life in Baghdad, such as date palms and the sounds of a copper market, to mark her work as indisputably Iraqi — and as she turns those symbols on their head to create something which can fit into the designation of talī‘a (الطّليعة), rather than as the simplified ‘Arab avant-garde’.

The author begins by outlining the term Arab avant-garde, including a discussion of the systematic exclusion of the “Arab” designation in better known avant-garde circles. The author then succinctly describes the contemporary political history of Iraq to highlight the importance of that which is Iraqi in the avant-garde. This framework provides the basis for Nadeem’s background and, in turn, the analysis of a few of Nadeem's compositions from her 2005 album, Out of Baghdad!

Dolly’s Laugh

Ruari Paterson-Achenbach, Sophie Marie Niang — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This creative response is an attempt to understand our long-standing obsession with the moments that shouldn’t be in song recordings but somehow remain. Written while we were physically apart over the course of a few months, our dialogue responds to a desire to understand whether there is any meaning in these obsessions, whether they can teach us about sound and the musicians that produce them. We want to call attention to what is usually discarded – what happens before, after or in-between, what happens on top of – moments in excess of the track which break the performative bargain and reveal the multiple possibilities always contained within performance. The piece is accompanied by a soundpiece putting some of the recorded moments mentioned in dialogue with each other.

Notes on Contributors

Ruari Paterson-Achenbach is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher, currently undertaking their PhD in Music at the University of Cambridge. Their work thinks about sound and performance as vehicles for memory, resistance and temporal antagonism. Through a critical engagement with ‘Outsider Music,’ their PhD uncovers radical potential for creativity within and through non-normative social life. More broadly, their research interests include queer temporality, critical listening, and creative anarchism. Ruari was also a ‘New Creative’ and has produced works with and for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the BBC and NTS Radio.

Sophie Marie Niang is a black feminist researcher from Paris, working at the intersection of cultural studies, black studies, and queer theory. She is currently a Junior Research Fellow in European Cultural Studies at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. Her first book project explores black refusal and worldmaking in contemporary France, through a focus on rap, black women’s self narratives in film and literature, afrofeminist performance, and literary fiction. Her work is published in Sociology Compass, Feminist Review, and Modern & Contemporary France.

Vectors of Novelty: Co-Composing Selves in the Terminal Present

Iain Findlay-Walsh, Tristan Partridge — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This multimedia essay is part of an ongoing collaborative project that examines the porous boundaries and theoretical connections that link conceptions of self, temporality, and composition. Drawing on our respective fields of practice in sound art and social anthropology, we engage with Henri Bergson’s person as a “vector of novelty on the edge of the present” and subsequent critiques that urge a de-naturalizing (and de-narrativizing) of the self. The work presented here comprises excerpts from collaborative writing, a 4-minute video, text-image fragments, and a compilation of audio voice notes, all in response to Erin Manning’s open-ended question, “How can we compose collectively, working both with past and emergent techniques, without holding fast to the security of habits, material or conceptual?” (Manning 2019, 367). Our approach to (co)composition attends to the co-emergence of experience and connection. We explore composition as mutual processes of emergence and exploration that take shape within and respond to specific spatiotemporal relationships and media. Rather than seeing collaboration as a process of intentionally narrating oneself to collaborators, research communities, and others (both known and unknown), the methods and approaches emerging through this project are designed as ways of unsettling any notion of fixity in these relationships. In this sense, this research is developed as a series of methodological and dialogical experiments in living with these questions and is offered as a contribution to critical debates on issues of research process, coherence, and integrity. Throughout, we invoke the “terminal present” as a term for a contemporary condition of temporal complexity, precarity, and stasis that doubles as a name for subjectivities produced in and through such conditions.

Notes on Contributors

Iain Findlay-Walsh (he/him) is a sound artist, music producer, researcher and teacher exploring sound-based and autoethnographic methods for the study of personal listening. He releases sound art and music under the name 'Klaysstarr Nets' (Entr'acte, Pan y Rosas), with related writing on sound, media and perceptual experience appearing in various peer-reviewed journals and books, including the Journal of Sonic Studies, and Organised Sound. By day, he teaches experimental music and sound art at the University of Glasgow where he co-directs the Immersive Experiences Lab on digital media reception. By night, he plays bass guitar and contributes sound design as a member of the doomgaze band, Cwfen.

Tristan Partridge is a lecturer in Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and co-founder of the Center for Restorative Environmental Work. Tristan is a social anthropologist whose research addresses the dynamics of collaboration working with social movements and communities in struggle in Ecuador, India, and the USA. Tristan’s ethnographic work also draws on aural anthropology and visual methods: he has written text scores for The Center For Deep Listening and his fieldwork photography has been exhibited internationally. His books include Burning Diagrams in Anthropology: An Inverse Museum (punctum 2024) and Mingas+Solidarity (Pazmaen 2024).

Polyrhythmic Cognition and Metric Spaces

Louis-Michel Tougas — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper introduces a novel approach to rhythm-based contemporary music composition. I propose that recent insights into the cognitive limits of rhythm and meter can be translated into a compositional framework that considers not only the structural and abstract properties of rhythm structures, but also their perceptual impact on an audience. This method enables the preservation of a high degree of structural complexity while enhancing its perceptual effectiveness and minimizing notational intricacy. The approach is facilitated by the use of OpenMusic, a computer-assisted composition software, alongside a visual representation of metric modulation networks that I call a rhythm lattice. To illustrate this approach, I present two examples from my recent chamber music works.

Notes on Contributor

Louis-Michel Tougas is a composer, percussionist, and producer based in Montréal, Québec. His doctoral research at McGill University explores the cognition of polyrhythm and the role of timbre as a form-bearing dimension of music perception. He has taught computer-assisted composition and 20th-century compositional techniques at McGill, and holds degrees in composition and analysis from the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal and the Hochschule für Musik Stuttgart. His music has been performed internationally by ensembles including Talea, the Bozzini Quartet, Ascolta, Quasar Saxophone Quartet, Ensemble Éclat, and Quatuor Mémoire.

Being Heard

Soundcamp cooperative, Sasha Baraitser Smith , Mortimer Drew, Grant Smith — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We describe Radio With Palestine (RWP), a project that broadcasts live sounds from demonstrations. Reflecting on RWP as ongoing work, we are thinking about rhythms, temporalities and resonant spaces of direct actions as manifestations of political urgencies and injustices. Ecological radio moves live sounds from place to place, colliding timeframes and moments of emergent struggles, creating a live archive that aims to amplify and document ephemeral situations, without turning them into spectacles or specimens.

During RWP, people attend actions in support of Palestine and run live audio streams. Using free streaming apps and DIY audio devices with omni-directional microphones, RWP enacts a form of flat listening against the grain of mainstream media. Events vary from minor acts of resistance at neighbourhood scale to large, conventionally under-reported protests.

By drawing attention to how (different) these situations sound, we can think about the ways direct actions work beyond each site, with its distinct architectures, tempos and acoustics. Being in and broadcasting streets full of dissonant sounds and voices, hearing ourselves back with lag, we sense both the possibilities and the limits of synchrony / solidarity.

Notes on Contributors

Soundcamp (Sasha Baraitser Smith, Mortimer Drew, Grant Smith) are an arts cooperative based at Stave Hill Ecological Park in Rotherhithe and Work Shop 1 in Loughborough Junction, with members in Glasgow, Berlin, Yorkshire, Crete and The Netherlands. We are interested in diy infrastructures that can move live sounds between places and situations, and give attention to less heard human and non-human communities. Our work appears as live transmissions, workshops, sound devices and events.

Music, art and scholarship in the midst of temporal disorder

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“From Chaos to Calm”

Winnie W. C. Lai — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Infrastructure enables modes of politics to come into being and gives rise to an apparatus of governmentality. Through sensing and “listening in” (LaBelle 2019) to the city, the urban “acoustic habitus” (Feld 1982) emerges out of the city’s governmentality; it comprises ways of listening that define a biopolitical “sonic citizenship” (Western 2021). Governance in Hong Kong’s new “lawscape” (LaBelle 2021) reorients one’s acoustic being in urban spaces, resounding an aural monopoly, which I call the infrastructural acoustic. In the new environment, the “semi-authoritarian” system (Tai 2020) has muted the cacophony of raging roars and unintelligible protests, infusing the city’s atmosphere with an affective entanglement of tear gas and bodies during upheavals in the passé “semi-democratic” (Tai 2020) spaces. Together with Hong Konger self-reflexive poetry, this short film juxtaposes photos, footage, interviews, and field recordings of Hong Kong’s urban spaces during and after years of pro-democracy protests in the old and new Hong Kong to reveal an invisibilized “sphere of appearance” in the “inhabitable ground” (Butler 2016). Insisting on the significance of sound and listening in making sense of the affective spheres that circulate in a transforming environment, this combined work crafts an intermedial space where the audience can sense these forces and attunements through a mode of schizophrenic listening and discern the dynamics between sounds, collective memories, and infrastructural matters to reimagine the possibilities of the counter-infrastructural acoustics where sounds of freedom attempt to retrench state violence.

Notes on Contributor

Winnie Lai is an (ethno)musicologist, multimodal artist and returning singer-songwriter working as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music (2024–2026) at Dartmouth College. She earned a Ph.D. in Music Studies (Ethnomusicology) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024. Her work crosses disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating ethnographic materials with historical archives and employing critical theoretical tools with cutting-edge intermedial methods. At Dartmouth, she is developing her first monograph, Unsounding Hong Kong: From Protests to Silence, to study the sonic and affective currents circulating through local and transnational protests. A Hong Kong–born and raised, classically trained mezzo-soprano (who usually sings pop), she is developing new multimodal research: Theorizing R&B Ad-libs: Intercultural Soul Aesthetics, Racialized Listening, and Singing Virtuosity in Sinophone Pop and Cantopop.