Conference
There is already a new nomos
in formation.
There is already a new nomos in formation, co-evolving around us through the accidental megastructure of planetary-scale computation – a supranational historic moment in process. We do not believe this process is absolutely ineffable, nor lacking in intelligibility. We even say this process is not unthinkable.
Yet, as a self-futurizing exercise, recognizing and understanding the unthinkable of nomos, must take itself beyond our contemporary normative conditions, launching from multi-perspectival views: from the liminal spaces of the abstract and the concrete, where identity politics blur with the misrecognized, the misplaced or the proudly ambiguous, to zones free from top-down Corporatocratic domination. To attempt this kind of unthinking requires an actualization that transits between the local and the global. It involves rewiring our contemporary narratives, rather than reconstituting unjust territorial, political and institutional frameworks. It involves dismantling media rhetoric that (dis)orients us with its uncritical judgments and opinions. It involves understanding the deeper implications of our contemporary state of information war.
During the Unthinkable Nomos Conference Event and Workshop, we will discuss together how we can derive conceptions and affordances of the new nomos in order to gain traction upon new spatial and rational freedoms. Our aims are clear, to develop research and ideas into more sensitive languages and sonic / visual cues for the public sphere, that can expose the rhetoric that makes visible surrounding hegemonic and xenophobic discourses. We would like to unthink our contemporary mutating nomos, to germinate a self-correcting enterprise for extraterritorial social-political justice and greater rational freedoms for all.
National Gallery of Art, Vilnius
Conference is free of charge.
Please take notice that we have limited space for 160 people.
Speakers
METAHAVEN
Daniel van der Velden
METAHAVEN is a collective of designers and artists, founded by Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk, and working on the cutting blade between aesthetics and politics. They are the authors of Uncorporate Identity (2010), Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? (2013), and Black Transparency (2015). Between 2010 and 2013 Metahaven designed a collection of scarves, t-shirts, and visual identity proposals for WikiLeaks.
Their films include City Rising (2014) and several music videos with composer and singer Holly Herndon. In 2016, their feature-length documentary film The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda) premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Tanja Ostojić
Tanja Ostojić (*1972 Yugoslavia) is Berlin based performance and interdisciplinary artist and cultural activist. She studied art in Belgrade, France and Germany. From 2012-14 she was interdisciplinary research fellow at the University of Arts Berlin. She includes herself as a character in performances and uses diverse media in her artistic researches, thereby examining social configurations, relations of power, issues of racisms, discrimination, etc. She works predominantly from the migrant woman’s perspective, while political positioning and integration of recipients define approaches in her work.
with
Inigo Wilkins
Inigo Wilkins took his masters in Sonic Culture at the University of East London, and recently completed his doctorate in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, supervised by Dr. Luciana Parisi. The title of his thesis was ‘Irreversible Noise: The Rationalization of Randomness and the Fetishization of Indeterminacy’, which he is now working on for a forthcoming publication by Urbanomic. He is co-director of the online arts journal and research platform Glass Bead.
He is currently living at the Performing Arts Forum in France. Publications include ‘Catalyzing Dissent’ published in Mute magazine, December 2012, ‘Destructive Destruction: An Ecological Study of High Frequency Trading’ first published in Mute magazine. January 2013. An extended version of ‘Destructive Destruction’ published in HFT Review, February 2013, in the Journal of Sustainable Finance and Investment, January 2014, and in ‘Plants, Androids and Operators: A Post-Media Handbook’ published by PML Books, 2014.
15:00 Introducing Nomos
15:10 Tanja Ostojić
16:20 Information Skies
17:00 Daniel van der Velden
30 Minutes Break
18:15 Inigo Wilkins
19:30 Panel Discussion
20:00 Q & A Audience
20:30 Closing Of Conference
Night
Can music demonstrate
modest and non-violent social
and political change?
Bringing together various artist perspectives, from the gnarly, warped mantras of Aïsha Devi, to the decolonial sonic globalism of Music For Your Plants, to J. G. Biberkopf’s simulated natures, the Unthinkable Nomos Night proposes to examine the speculative demands of the unthinkable nomos, highlighting tensions that foreground our (in)audible perceptual relations within the contemporary information-heavy environment, exposing the tools and tactics of sonic experimentation that make this foregrounding possible.
Can we reimagine our globally connected social and cultural horizons through the audible contortions in Devi’s songs as they instruct a more general knowledge for how we might twist, morph or bend out of shape the current social norms that draw contemporary lines of demarcation? Do J.G. Biberkopf’s investigations in net phenomenology help gain critical awareness of the user-interface layer of the new nomos of the cloud? How does Dodo Mundo and Encore’s queering of normative spaces of pop culture reclaim a possibility to construct escape routes to more just social order?
Location: Kvartalas, Vilnius
Entrance fee is 8€
Please take notice that we have limited space
for 200 people.
Aïsha Devi
Live A/V
Her debut LP ‘Of Matter And Spirit’, a “materialisation of her initiatic journey through her spiritual and origin quests”, was released October 2015 via Houndstooth and followed by March 2016′s remix EP ft. Lakker, Throwing Shade, Killing Sound, Mind:Body:Fitness and video game by Emile Barret. Her A/V show with Emile Barret has gone on to be presented all over the world including Montreal, Moscow, Mexico City and Tokyo.
with
Emile Barret
He now lives in Paris, but frequently travels to London and Lausanne. A lot of his work is focusing on saturated representations, metamorphosis leading to multiple perceptions. His work with Aïsha Devi – in addition to press pictures – has been mainly on the A/V side of things; after developing a video game around her album concept, he has expanded the concept in order to exploit this resource for live shows. They have worked together on a challenging, perception-altering visual setup to accompany her music in an immersive way.
Dodo Mundo
Encore
J. G. Biberkopf
His recent first EP, titled Ecologies, launched the new Knives label created by Kuedo and Joe Shakespeare of Berlin’s Motto Books. From cyber ambience and slamming rhythmic constructions, to instant trails of web-filtered grime and beatless studies of net phenomenology, Biberkopf’s first release was intended as a field trip into the representations of nature that emerge from the (social) media scape. Debut album, second edition in the series, called ‘Ecologies II: Ecosystems of Excess’ is coming out in November 11th.
The chosen title of the trilogy reflects more broadly Biberkopf’s overall musical practice, namely the urge to make music sound as a “self-sufficient” ecology that cannot be traced back to him as a creator, but that rather seems to originate from an actual landscape. In this vein, he works intensively with aural signifiers, taking sounds that are eminent in public sphere, and noises that work as signs or memes, to explore the semiotics of sound.
JGB is an alter-ego of Gediminas Žygus, whose past works and collaborations were exhibited, performed in Berghain (Berlin), Pompidou (Paris), Barbican (London), Paradiso (Amsterdam), The Kitchen (NYC), CAC, Rupert (Vilnius), etc. Gediminas was part of the co-ordinating team of Newman Festival 2015, and is part of the coordinating team of Unthinkable Nomos.
Music For Your Plants
Live
With roots in World Music the project has grown into a distinct venture in sonic globalism. MFYP performs associative research into digital cartographies of post-colonialism and the Exotics, using non-human agents as a mode of communication.
The audio palette of MFYP is best described as an IMAX experience of a world after humans where objects are given agency to speak to – and of themselves through audible frequencies. The Earth is facing an anthropomorphic gaze while the social-economy pushes forward scenarios of diplomatic first contact with the mythical Other. MFYP constructs a journey using tools of speculative realism and machine assisted composition to explore the great digital divide that goes ‘Beyond Nature and Culture’.
In the works of MFYP there is an ominous but pleasing tone to the interplay of semantic and atmospheric sounds — the human voice spoken by a machine becomes a birdcall for the rocks.
21:30 Doors
22:00 Unthinkable Nomos
23:00 J. G. Biberkopf
00:00 Music For Your Plants
01:00 Aïsha Devi w. Emile Barret
Of Matter and Spirit live A/V
02:00 Dodo Mundo
03:00 Encore
04:00 Dodo Mundo x Encore
Workshop
Tracing the Unthinkable Nomos
On November 6, Unthinkable invites participants to the Unthinkable Nomos Workshop at Rupert, Centre for Art and Education. Through collective sessions, we will form a research cluster to investigate the cardinal threads pertinent to rethinking our contemporary nomoi (plural of nomos). Following the Unthinkable Nomos Conference and Night, four working groups will be formed to coordinate a concentrated research area, defined by four important research threads, in recognition of diversity in thought. In order to develop the integrity and rigour of a collective thinking practice, each working group will formulate questions particular to their epistemological lenses, for two invited informants – scholars in according areas of research important to the development of the platform, for rethinking and unthinking nomos.
The methodology has been uniquely conceived within Unthinkable in order to maximize the creative potential and intellectual efficiency for collective research in a new formation. Confirmed videocall guests for the Sunday workshop in Rupert are: Nick Srnicek, lecturer at City University, author of Platform Capitalism (Polity), Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso, with Alex Williams), and the forthcoming After Work: What’s Left and Who Cares? (Verso, with Helen Hester); and Peter Wolfendale, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Johannesburg. Wolfendale’s work develops the consequences of philosophical rationalism for the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and metaphysics. He is the author of Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes (Urbanomic 2014).
Location: Rupert, Vilnius Workshop is free of charge. Please take notice that we have limited space for 25 people. Registration is needed nomos@unthinkable.site
De-Coloniality, Transmodernity, Epistemo-Diversity
Platform Capitalism and Planetary Computation
Extra-Territoriality and
Global (In)Justice
Social Intelligence
