Essential parts of a standard sound system circuitry such as speakers, cables, microphones are often made to disappear in the background of an electronic sonic experience. What happens when we breakdown these technical components to their most essential parts and reimagine the material elements of sound to tell new stories about what we are hearing?
Drawing on construction and fabrication techniques found in DIY practices, craft, weird science and pure artistic intuition, this workshop emphasises an open hands-on approach to lo-fi sound system creation that embodies a plurality of whispers, noises, para communications, occult electromagnetism and physical audio-visual experimentations.
Practical info
12—14.04.2024, 10:00—18:00
iMAL, Brussels
Workshop language: Claire & Darsha both speak English & French
No pre-requisite required.
You're welcome to bring old transformers, metal, copper elements, wires, old speakers or headphones and weird stuff to play around, elements to customise your artwork, plus whatever tools, cutter, plier, tape etc you have around! We'll also have tools and material at your disposal!
Tickets: 80€ (full price), 50€ (students, teachers, citizens of Molenbeek, unemployed, 65+, Fablab members)
Darsha Hewitt (CA/DE) is an interdisciplinary artist that investigates the material politics of music and sound. She makes electromechanical sound installations, drawings, audio-visual works, how-to videos, sculptural installations and performative workshops that explore technological entanglements and their implications on humans and ecology.
With a media archeological perspective she explores sound beyond its sonic parameters through deconstruction of discarded technology. She focuses on the ethics of (planned) obsolescence and the practices of technology that consumer society throws away as a way to trace out systems of power, economy and control inherent throughout socio-techno infrastructures.
Alongside reverse engineering, restoration and aesthetic experiments with historically significant music technology, she works with retired industry technicians to learn dissapearing tacit knowledge that she integrate into studio research and share within the art and DIY technology context.
The artworks of Claire Williams take the form of woven antennas, glass sculptures filled with plasma or devices that sense the invisible. Data of radio telescopes and radio scanners materialise themselves in knitted stitches, sound vibrations or through luminous plasma. She sculpts her electronic components to make visible the electromagnetic movements from the cosmos, through our magnetosphere, to radio waves that cross our terrestrial environment or the ones emanating from our bodies and psychic activity. She is currently exploring in a duo « The Æthers » which collects and reactivate practices of the invisibles found in the archives of experimental and occult sciences of the 19th and 20th century.
Credits
Darsha portrait by Lena Maria Loose
The Cookery 2024 is possible thanks to the support of Innoviris; the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, through the transnational cooperation project "European Digital Deal"; and the Polish Institute.