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)



WHERE AND WHEN?

This is an online course, but it involves realtime sessions and contact time with your tutor - it's not a "download these videos and watch them at your leisure" type of thing - it's a real workshop with live lectures, individual tuition, assignments and feedback sessions. We've tried to make this remote session as close as possible to the experience of an onsite workshop at CAMP. The course starts on 15/05/2021 and ends on 31/08/2021. The schedule for sessions is as follows (all times are CET):

• Session 1: 15/05/2021, 17:00 - 20:00 CET
• Session 2: 22/05/2021, 17:00 - 20:00 CET
• Session 3: 29/05/2021, 17:00 - 20:00 CET
• Session 4: 28/08/2021, 17:00 - 20:00 CET
• Session 5: 29/08/2021, 17:00 - 20:00 CET

HOW TO BOOK

To book your place on the course, click the button in the green section above. You won't pay anything right now - we'll send you a booking confirmation email with everything you need to know next. Your place is reserved without payment for three days.

You'll find a payment link in the booking confirmation email - follow the link to make a payment (either in full, or the first payment of a month payment plan). In the latter case, a monthly payment plan will be put in place, so your card will be charged 1/ of the fee today, and 1/ each month (on the same day) for an additional -1 months. All card payments are handled by Stripe, and are extremely secure. We don't store any card data ourselves - all of this is handled securely off-site by Stripe. If you have a discount or grant code, you will be able to add it when you follow the payment link in your confirmation email.

Once you've made a payment, you'll receive another email containing your receipt, links to resources, contact information and access to our group chat to discuss the workshop with other participants.