Art Cinema OFFoff is a platform for experimental cinema and audiovisual art. OFFoff searches for films from the past and present that enter into cinematographic and narrative experiments, often navigating between cinema and the other arts. During the opening weekend of Kunsthal,Ghent, ArtCinema OFFoff puts up a broadcast on Domes FM around RRadio Triton, a collective and experimental research project produced by a.pass. The broadcast circles around relations between artistic research and speculative fictions. What kinds of futures do artistic research practices imagine? Which fictions are needed? And what voices do we need to bring those fictions up? The program for and the performance of the broadcast is a collaboration between ArtCinema OFFoff (Kunsthal Ghent), RRadio Triton (a.pass, Brussels) and Domes FM (Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre, Liverpool). With and by Deborah Birch, Edward Clive, Sven Dehens, Edward George, Christian Hansen, Pierre Rubio and Sina Seifee.
excerpt from the broadcast…. soon online in full…
Interviewer : What is RRadio Triton?
RRadio Triton : A seminar, ‘Trouble on Radio Triton ((((((( changing (the) world (s) ))))))’ was held in a.pass between January and April 2017 curated and organised by Pierre Rubio, gathering it forces and resources around the question of artistic imagination and political agency. Among other enquiries, some of the main questions that were raised during the seminar were: Do you–as artists–through your research contribute to changes in contemporary culture? And if so, what are the cultures generated by your research? Which alternative worlds does your artistic research/practice contain? What is the operative link between your artistic research and the future? Following that initiative, now the project RRadio Triton sets out to dream of operating like a time machine carrying its protagonists through time back to the 2017’s events and returning them as new narrators. By adopting the identity of an ad hoc fictional radio station, it records, edits, samples, remixes and releases pieces of audiowork and soundscapes that originated at the 2017 seminar. RRadio Triton is becoming a hybridised dispositive about the politics of imagination and speculation, not merely archiving, rather activating a labor-intensive work of memory elaborated by the notion of radio as an instrument operative on the real. This way of approaching archive and dissemination mirrors the current expressions of a.pass’s criticality as an institution that is committed to the ecologies of critique and the reformulation of its research-tools and practices.
The audio publication RRadio Triton is the outcome of the voluntary contributions of all the actors of the 2017 seminar and their recomposition in the present time.
Interviewer : In response to the invitation of ArtCinema OFFoff to interact within the (re)opening event of the Kunsthal Gent in January 2019, RRadio Triton collaborates with curator Sven Dehens and will structure its first broadcast with two selected pieces that both perform complex critical dispositives around ideas of memory, reparation and worlding. Through OFFoff webpage we can access to a lot of informations about the event, but how a radio station -even fictional like RRadio Triton became involved with a cinematic event?
RRadio Triton : Some shared views on reparative fiction for sure… And a lot of the audio objects/pieces constituting RRadio Triton relating more or less directly to cinema. Thematically first with a strong relation with science-fiction cinema genres and subgenres and critical questions around utopia/dystopia -central nodes in S-F cinema. There is also a more practice based link with film and more specifically with film soundtracking as some pieces are made after sound research ateliers called “Foley your Research” that were performed around the question “how does/could your research sound like?”. As well, some pieces relate directly to existing films, whether because of the central thematic of one of the recorded live lectures, or because of a structuring cinematographic reference/quote/appropriation. And last, some pieces engage with convoking cinematographic images/bodies through sound. They channel bodies, affects, voices and presences through different use of sound and they ‘produce’ images without any actual camera.
Interviewer: Could this be seen as a different form of worlding? One of RRadio Triton’s main endeavours?
RRadio Triton: One of the justifications for worlding -imagining and situating the world otherwise- is that the stories of this world are getting toxic as they are mere instruments for social reproduction. Re-imagining the erased stories -erased by economical, colonial, patriarchal, ideological or cultural instrumental power orders and determining modes of governance- and speculating other stories can produce (and not only reproduce) other social orders and thus other worlds. The two pieces we are proposing in dialogue with Cinemas OFFoff both try to tackle the very possibility of imagining differently and thus create the necessary conditions for re-invention and speculation. They world.
Interviewer: Can you present the pieces shortly?
RRadio Triton: The first piece is a montage of a live lecture given by Sina Seiffe during Trouble on Radio Triton ((((((( changing (the) world (s) )))))) -a seminar held by a.pass in 2017, it focuses on a ‘problematic’ social media video and puts it back in motion critically, rebroadcasting it in a way. The second piece is an edit of a rare live communication -part of the same seminar- by Edward George revisiting his research work developed for the iconic film Last Angel of History.
Interviewer: The radio will be hosted by Domes FM, an online radio station set up in the basements of the Bidston Observatoy Artistic Research Centre (BOARC). What is BOARC?
RRadio Triton: Located in the outskirts of Liverpool, BOARC is a not-for-profit study centre, focused on providing artists, writers, academics, performers etc with a cheap, temporary place to dictate their own methods of work, allowing them to come together and stay, to develop projects that require time and space, in a non-pressured environment.
Interviewer: On Saturday the 26th of January, between 12h and 18h, one can follow and attend the live broadcast from Kunsthal Gent. There will be space for participation in diverse conversation formats held between the recorded audio pieces. In addition, on Friday the 25th of January, between 20h and 22h, there will be a Domes FM broadcast from the basements of the Bidston Observatory by Edward Clive, one of the hosts of the space. What will Edward Clive do?
RRadio Triton: In reaction to RRadio Triton, he will bring a mix of soundtracks and queer experimental foley from the depths of science fiction cinema.
Interviewer: Is it possible to listen to the broadcast online?
RRadio Triton: Yes! One can follow the broadcast online during the announced hours. The URL for the broadcast will be announced in time.
Interviewer: Can I get the credits of RRadio Triton’s pieces?
RRadio Triton: Of course, here you go…
RRadio Triton is an a.pass production initiated, curated and hosted by Pierre Rubio, and is technically, artistically and dramaturgically supported by Christian Hansen and Sina Seifee. The pieces we will broadcast on the 26th of January from Kunsthal Ghent on Domes FM Liverpool are:
‘An Animal Escape Case’ an audio editing of a live essay-performance, 70’, 2019 Author and Performer/Lecturer Sina Seiffe Editor Pierre Rubio / Sound Christian Hansen / Production a.pass The lecture was performed in March 2017 in Brussels within the lectures series “Book Club/Trouble on Radio Triton” at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies – a platform for artistic research)
In his essay-performance ‘An Animal Escape Case’, Sina Seifee opens one object. He unpacks the destiny of a social media video file about a feral cat, that, in anthropomorphic terms, adopted a kitten, and the reactions of Sina’s family in Tehran towards these shared social-media digital images. This object and relational event is transformed into a landscape of observations, philosophical concerns, sociological anthropological and historical analyses. The complex arrangement relates diverse notions as, greeting, encounter, understanding, friendship, technology and most importantly, a destabilizing reality for humans, that of wildness. Sina performs as the narrator of a kind of film in which he is both the witness and the main actor. The edited audio piece tries to bring back his (intense) presence and incarnated storytelling, as well as the many references and borrowings to popular and not popular culture both from Iran and the West.
The essay/performance investigates the fragile intersections of friendship between digital avatars and trans-animals in the social media in Tehran’s landscape. Through personal animal-findings and fairy-tale associations the An Animal Escape Case interprets the epistemological openings and closings in cross-species sociality, exemplified by the everyday use of mobile phones where images of pets circulate and different species meet in mediated formats. By analyzing everything that anthropomorphism can perform and contain, and seen through the animality in the situated conditions of contemporary domestic life, the essay/performance addresses the relationships between people, animals and their surroundings in a socio-technological milieu as complex as Tehran’s urban environment. (Sina Seifee)
Sina Seifee is an artist-researcher-storyteller working on poetics of animal description (ecological cosmologies of nonhumans-with-history). Born in Tehran (1982), he studied Applied Mathematics in Beheshti University and Visual Arts in Charsoo Institute of Art in Tehran. After moving to Germany in 2011, he graduated in Cologne with master diploma in Media Arts from Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln (2014) and received his postmaster in Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies from a.pass in Brussels (2017). His work, realized in different forms of lecture-performances, reading group, workshops, image making, video and writing- is centered around the questions of technology, storytelling, globalism and intercultural mythologies in the heterogeneous knowledge-worlds of art and sciences, with attention to the premodern era.
‘Last angel of history’ an audio editing of a live lecture, 3 episodes of 30′, 2019 Author and Performer/Lecturer Dr. Edward George Editor Pierre Rubio / Sound Christian Hansen / Production a.pass The lecture was performed in March 2017 in Brussels within the lectures series “Book Club/Trouble on Radio Triton” at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies – a platform for artistic research)
Dr. Edward George is the writer, researcher, and narrator of the seminal fiction-documentary film The Last Angel of History. In a rare live communication he shares the research processes and thinking that supported the creation of the film. The audio piece revisits George revisiting his work of revisiting the lineage of Afrofuturism. The Last Angel of History is one of the most influential video-essays of the 1990s influencing filmmakers and inspiring conferences, novels and exhibitions. Black Audio Film Collective’s exploration of the chromatic possibilities of digital video is embedded within a mythology of the future that creates connections between black (un)popular culture, outer space and the limits of the human condition. The influential Black Audio Film Collective crafted this experimental blend of sci-fi parable and essay film, which also serves as an essential primer on the aesthetics and dynamics of contemporary Afrofuturism. Interviews with esteemed musicians, writers, and cultural critics are interwoven with the fictional story of the “data thief,” who must travel through time and space in search of the code that holds the key to his future.
Dr. Edward George is a founding member of Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998), the multimedia duo Flow Motion (1996-present), and the electronic music group Hallucinator (1998-present). He lives in London.
Which alternative worlds do our researches/practices contain and can immanently produce? How do we relate to the future via artistic-research? As artists, do we through our researches contribute to changes in contemporary culture? And if yes, then which cultures do our researches produce?
Trouble on Radio Triton is a metaphoric multipolar dispositive. A discursive and practice-based ‘lure for feeling’ and thinking. An operative alibi strategically using ‘if’s’, ‘what if’s’, ‘as if’s’ to exercise critique and imagine alternatives. Read more..
Starting with Darko Suvin's ideas of Cognitive Estrangement, we will look at some of the mechanisms and functions of science fiction, and consider how the imagining of alternative realities operates is a critical gesture with which to view consensus reality Read more..
How does/could my research sound like?
Does your research have a direct auditory quality and content or would you like/need to create a fictional soundscape to give it a sound? Read more..
(Revisiting SF Cinema) curated by Dehens & Kaplunova
YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS!? is a series of screenings revisting SF-Cinema with a focus
on 'other' (non-)western SF. It aims to look critically at the genre as well as to reconsider
the potential of the genre to look critically. The series includes films and shorts from the
trenches of Soviet SF, the esoteric SF of Unarius, old, new and queer interpretations of SF,
early works by Black Audio Film Collective, an opening to Russian cosmism, works by
Chris Kraus, early Cronenberg, something called Betaville, trailers and more.
NO SUCH THING AS GRAVITY! Read more..
Reading Sessions of Donna Haraway's essay 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective'.
This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations. Read more..
Myriam Van Imschoot will pass on her discoveries within her interest in the interview, the doors that led over time to appreciating speech for what it offers beyond meaning: significant aberrations, iterations, flux and rupture, modulation, and not in the least, different alterations of subjectivity. This three day intensive will combine artist talk, screenings, voice improvisations, score explorations, and other tele-scopic incursions into artistic practice and research. Read more..
Is there something to hear between the 0 and the 1 of digitized compressed music? Is there something to de-cypher in our coded Nyabinghi drums? What is the message hidden between themes, rythms, intonations, improvisations, the samples, the drum, the bass, the cuts and the pastes? and what kind of mental space or imaginary frame allowed/constrained the emergence of a futuristic post-modern culture within the Black Atlantic ?
We’ll build or we’ll destroy.
We’ll learn about the Know-Ledge. Read more..
(Revisiting SF Cinema) curated by Dehens & Kaplunova
YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS!? is a series of screenings revisting SF-Cinema with a focus
on 'other' (non-)western SF. It aims to look critically at the genre as well as to reconsider
the potential of the genre to look critically. The series includes films and shorts from the
trenches of Soviet SF, the esoteric SF of Unarius, old, new and queer interpretations of SF,
early works by Black Audio Film Collective, an opening to Russian cosmism, works by
Chris Kraus, early Cronenberg, something called Betaville, trailers and more.
NO SUCH THING AS GRAVITY! Read more..
this is not wishful thinking, it is speculating utopia from what is already there
Rather than lamenting the scarcity of agreeable situations in our present, we will wilfully engage in expanding through the force of our imagination these maybe fragile, uncertain, easily disposable snippets of communal life which are also part of the world as we know it. Taking these as sufficient evidence for the existence of a world we want to inhabit, we will turn the logic of exception into a logic of rule, and run the risk of building monstrous worlds. At least these might be differently interesting monstrosities. Read more..
(Revisiting SF Cinema) curated by Dehens & Kaplunova
YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS!? is a series of screenings revisting SF-Cinema with a focus
on 'other' (non-)western SF. It aims to look critically at the genre as well as to reconsider
the potential of the genre to look critically. The series includes films and shorts from the
trenches of Soviet SF, the esoteric SF of Unarius, old, new and queer interpretations of SF,
early works by Black Audio Film Collective, an opening to Russian cosmism, works by
Chris Kraus, early Cronenberg, something called Betaville, trailers and more. NO SUCH THING AS GRAVITY! Read more..
The influential Black Audio Film Collective crafted this experimental blend of sci-fi parable and essay film, which also serves as an essential primer on the aesthetics and dynamics of contemporary Afrofuturism. Interviews with esteemed musicians, writers, and cultural critics are interwoven with the fictional story of the “data thief,” who must travel through time and space in search of the code that holds the key to his future. Dr Edward George, the writer, researcher, presenter of this ground breaking science fiction documentary, will present and discuss the film and its themes of music, Diaspora, science fiction, and its engagement with Afro futurism. Read more..
The a.pass Book Club welcomes “what if” expert-consultant Laurence Rassel. Long ago she diagnosed the vacuity of artistic practices when its formats of knowledge-production are not ‘situated’ in an ecology of art that encompasses social and psychological factors. Paradoxically she considers fiction, science-fiction, narratives and role plays as paramount tools to achieve that goal. Laurence Rassel will address the notion of ‘Radical Hospitality’ by revisiting Stitch and Split, and some of the curatorial operating principles and practices she developed in Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona as an engaged feminist curator.
Read more..
"We need new types of narratives and techniques. Stories that reclaim the earth and the commons that capitalism has stolen from us. Stories that invite us to take up and create trans-species sensitivities, trans-matters vitalities and trans-cerebral unrests. And it’s not enough imagining them, these stories have to be made and experienced." In this talk/reading session, Fabrizio Terranova will revisit a recent text by Donna Haraway, “Sympoiesis - Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble” and present the different projects he is involved in where activism, speculative fiction and pedagogy merge. Read more..
lecture, performative publishing, postgraduate program
The essay-performance plays with some standards of cross-species identification according to an Indo-Iranian mode of subjectivity and my own animal-findings in contemporary Tehran. We zoom in what the idea of "wilderness" withholds in technologically mediated stories and rumors that populate domestic life and quotidian of middle ages of this neighborhood. Through fairy-tale associations the lecture investigates operative non-understandings in old and new threads of cosmology that formulate reciprocity and being-with of the mediated non-humanity and investigates the cases of failed collaboration between species.
Read more..
We will use clothing like a pharmakon: what pollutes us can also clean us! By triggering the optical unconscious we can transform sensuously a commoditised visual world into a psychological cleansing process from cultural inherited aesthetics. Acknowledging the ability of three-dimensional images and materials as determinations of our perception of self is already an attempt to empower ourselves at changing our/the reality. Not only in words but also in materialising this reality into visible and tangible new object-beings. Read more..
In 2013 the Accelerationist Manifesto by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams emerged, aiming to question the traditional Left and to demarcate a renewed relation with capitalism, while its provocative aura generated a whirlwind of pros and cons. During this seminar we will not merely read excerpts of the manifesto. By means of a genealogy of the concept, we'll try to frame this tendency within the larger philosophical evolutions of the past decennia and nuance its “accelerating” characteristic.
Read more..
In the essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” Benjamin proposes a language metaphysics that extends to every thing. Every thing has a language: objects, animals, human beings but also immaterial things, like the Arts or Technology. For Benjamin language is therefore a medium going very much beyond human language and the communication through words. One could say language is the way in which some thing – indeed every thing – communicates itself to the world.
Read more..
(revisiting SF Cinema) curated by Dehens & Kaplunova
YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS!? is a series of screenings revisting SF-Cinema with a focus
on 'other' (non-)western SF. It aims to look critically at the genre as well as to reconsider
the potential of the genre to look critically. The series includes films and shorts from the
trenches of Soviet SF, the esoteric SF of Unarius, old, new and queer interpretations of SF,
early works by Black Audio Film Collective, an opening to Russian cosmism, works by
Chris Kraus, early Cronenberg, something called Betaville, trailers and more. Read more..
RRadio Triton is an experimental radio project aiming at producing collective audio documents gathered in and disseminated by the ad hoc fictional radio label/station, recording, editing, sampling, remixing and releasing audio and soundscapes. The audio publications of RRadio Triton are the recomposition of the outcomes of the voluntary contributions from all the actors of the 2017 a.pass seminar, BLOCK 17/I TROUBLE ON RADIO TRITON_ ((((((( CHANGING (THE) WORLD (S) )))))) curated by Pierre Rubio.
In 2019 RRadio Triton sets out to dream of operating like a time machine carrying its protagonists through time back to events and questions processed and produced during Trouble on Radio Triton ((((((( changing (the) world (s) )))))) -a seminar held by a.pass in 2017- and returning them as new narrators. RRadio Triton is a collective and experimental, digital audio project aimed at producing and publishing radio and sound documents. The ad hoc fictional radio station records, edits, samples, remixes and releases pieces of audiowork into the wireless atmospheric fabric and exists in between a digital sound-archive, ongoing conversations that originated at the 2017 seminar and live-appearances at events. Read more..
