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postgraduate program

TROUBLE ON RADIO TRITON_ ((((((( changing (the) world (s) ))))))

CURATED BY PIERRE RUBIO

9 January-30 April 2017

 

 

 

TROUBLE ON RADIO TRITON

((((((( changing (the) world(s) ))))))

 

 

‘ The struggle to survive is not really separable from the cultural life of fantasy, and the foreclosure of fantasy is one strategy for providing for the social death of persons. Fantasy is not the opposite of reality; it is what reality forecloses, and, as a result, it defines the limits of reality, constituting it as its constitutive outside. The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.’

Judith Butler

Undoing Gender, 2004

 

 

For the coming months, a.pass will adopt a ‘Sci-Fi terraforming mode of attention’ to challenge the current assembly of artist-researchers with the task of creating some conditions to critically questioning our abilities to ‘render our world habitable again’.

In fact, far from proposing an innocuous escapism in the false paradise of disembodied utopias, the next a.pass block is concerned with questions addressing the possible (in)capacity of art in general to produce a change and aims to understand the (im)possible contribution of art to collective empowerment by means of artistic researching.

The hybrid dispositive of the block is designed to research, reveal, activate and share the political inventive potentialities of our artistic researches through, paradoxically,  an immersion into and practice of different types of (speculative) fiction.

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.

Through a permanent dialogue between practice-based research, reflection on a variety of discourses and different modes of speculation we will explore multiple but simultaneous realities induced by a proliferation of free-form  ‘fictionalisations’ of every participants’ research in parallel with the individual development of these very researches.

What can we discover in our research by listening to it from another space – the one of fiction? Who will talk?  What will talk? But also: how to listen? Where to listen from? What to listen for? And whom to listen with? How to get to more than one point of listening? What/Who will become deaf? What/Who will be silenced? What/Who will be heard?

 

 

We will present our researches three times during the block, using different forms: at first a networked portrait then a master class and finally a performative artistic-research presentation.

On Thursday mornings we will welcome several engaged practitioners in a series of reading sessions, talks and discussions curated by Pierre Rubio in collaboration with some of the artists-researchers involved in the program.  They will share with us their efforts at creating conditions for imagining otherwise.

With e.g. : Sol Archer, Peggy Pierrot, Laurence Rassel, Fabrizio Terranova…

We will follow three different practice-based workshops:  Alice Chauchat’s Wordling from this World , Helena Dietrich’s The Tea Party  and a taylor-made proposal by Myriam Van Imschoot.

We will attend a series of conferences by Edward George, Paul Gilroy, Lizzie Borden and Donna Haraway.

We will collectively curate the Night Sessions: a series of evenings proposing lines of flight and unexpected connections with the program.

We will finally collaborate together at creating a true/false/real/fictional radio station: Radio Triton.

 

 

Radio Triton is the collective experimental dispositive of the block – a pedagogical and metaphorical tool. The proposal invites the participants to imagine and produce a series of audio pieces developed out of their researches and their contributions to the block. They can be produced individually or in collaboration within the ‘machine’ Radio Triton, which nature and identity we will collectively invent.

The Radio Triton ‘’program’ will follow two main trajectories. The first consisting of the recording of different forms of interviews between the artists researchers and the block-guests and second being the creation of fictional audio and sonic pieces through the application of various translation processes to the participants’ researches.

These translations/speculations will be supported by a series of sound research ateliers. Starting with ”Foley your Research” with Christian Hansen -a queer interpretation of Foley art- around the question “how does/could your research sound like?” and followed by a series of  Thursday afternoon sessions curated by Pierre Rubio in collaboration with the artists-researchers. The aim of the sessions will be in finding the appropriate ‘displacing questions’: the futures we need to produce the audio fictions we need.

Radio Triton will simultaneously engage in the tasks of performing, documenting, archiving and broadcasting alternative -both disturbing and reassuring- ways of becoming-with-each-other otherwise.

 

 

The block and the radio dispositive are named in reference to Donna Haraway’s “invitation to stay with the trouble” and the anarchist and hedonistic science-fiction masterpiece novel by Samuel R. Delany ‘Trouble on Triton – an ambiguous heterotopia’ from 1976. The novel was partly written in a dialogue with Ursula K. Le Guin’s anarchist and feminist science fiction novel ‘The Dispossessed’, whose subtitle is ‘an ambiguous utopia’. As the subtitles imply, the two novels offer conflicting perspectives on utopia and imagine the concrete possibilities and consequences of anarchist and queer societies.

Both books inviting us to see through the trouble.

 

Pierre Rubio, December 2016

 

 

“The first cultural device was probably a recipient …. Many theorisers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier”. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilise it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely foetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don’t know. I don’t even care. I’m not telling that story. We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard all about all the sticks spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.”

Ursula K. LeGuin in ’The Carrier bag Theory of Fiction’,

In Dancing at the Edge of the World, 1986

 

 

 





postgraduate program, research center

2017 BLOCK I

1 January-31 March 2017

2017 POST-GRADUATE PROGRAM AND RESEARCH PROJECTS SUMMARY
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postgraduate program, reading session

Book Club #1 COGNITIVE ESTRANGEMENT

19 January 2017 / a.pass

BOOK CLUB SERIES / Sol Archer

Data and Geordi as Holmes and Watson, Star Trek: The Next Generation
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
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postgraduate program, workshop

Christian Hansen F.Y.R.

23 January-6 February 2017 / a.pass

Foley Your Research

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?
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postgraduate program, reading session

Book Club #2 Black Atlantic & Speculative Fiction

26 January 2017

Book Club Series

Revisiting Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic in relation with afro-american SF and in particular Octavia Butler's.
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postgraduate program, reading session

YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS?! 1/4

30 January 2017 / a.pass

(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!
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postgraduate program, reading session

Book Clubs #3 & #4 Situated Knowledge

2-9 February 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Sina Seifee

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.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Myriam Van Imschoot TELESCOPING THE INTERVIEW

7-10 February 2017

three day intensive

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.
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postgraduate program, reading session

Book Club #5 Sacred Drift, a journey into political consciousness of sound

16 February 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Peggy Pierrot

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.
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postgraduate program, reading session

YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS?! 2/4

16 February 2017 / a.pass

(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!
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postgraduate program, workshop

Alice Chauchat worlding from this world

27 February-3 March 2017 / a.pass

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.
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postgraduate program, reading session

YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS?! 3/4

6 March 2017

(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!
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lecture, postgraduate program

LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY

8 March 2017 / a.pass

screening and presentation by Dr EDWARD GEORGE

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.
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lecture, postgraduate program

Book Club #6 A STITCHED AND SPLIT HOSPITALITY

9 March 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Laurence Rassel

The Laurence Rassel Show
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.
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lecture, postgraduate program

Book Club #7 Politics of Speculative fabulation

10 March 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Fabrizio Terranova

Dr Marboeuf
"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.
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lecture, performative publishing, postgraduate program

Book club #7bis An Animal Escape Case

10 March 2017 / a.pass

Book club series special event / Sina Seifee

Tessa Farmer - 2010 A Darker Shade of Grey
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. ​
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postgraduate program, workshop

Helena Dietrich The Tea Party

14-15 March 2017 / a.pass

in search for an elastic alien self

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.
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postgraduate program, seminar

BOOK CLUB #8 ACCELERA.PASS

16 March 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Michiel Vandevelde & Wouter De Raeve curated by Sébastien Hendrickx

Malign Velocities
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.
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postgraduate program, reading session

Book Club #9 Language as Magic and the Language of Things

17 March 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Caroline Godart & Marialena Marouda

Walter Benjamin in the National Library in Paris, 1937, taken by Gisèle Freund © bpk | IMEC, Fonds MCC | Gisèle Freund
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.
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postgraduate program, reading session

YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS ?! 4/4

20 March 2017 / a.pass

(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.
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performative publishing

RRadio Triton Data Retrieval Interface

1 July 2018 / online: https://rradiotriton.apass.be

Print https://rradiotriton.apass.be
frontispiece of RRadio Triton Data Retrieval Interface

https://rradiotriton.apass.be

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.

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performative publishing

by OFFoff, a.pass and Domes FM Broadcasting RRadio Triton

broadcast

25-26 January 2019 / Kunsthal, Ghent

“Tritonia festiva © weiweigao”
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?
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performative publishing

RRadio Triton

1 July 2019 / online: https://rradiotriton.apass.be/

audio publication

Tritonia Festiva_Photo Steve Lonhart_NOAA_MBNMS
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.
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APPLY TO THE A.PASS PROGRAMMES

Unfortunately we no longer have applications. Both programs: the Postgraduate as well as Research Center have come to an end due to the decision of the ministry of education to stop financing a.pass. At the moment we look into new plans for the future. More news soon on our website.

Alternativly you can upload your Research proposal, Portfolio, CV and other documents here.

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