NRU at SSTRAPP, 8-11 October
The Noise Research Union (NRU) are back to SSTRAPP and they’re bigger and better. The whole union will be there at BOARC, including: Martina Raponi, Sonia de Jager, Mattin, Cecile Malaspina, Miguel Prado, Inigo Wilkins, and our new core member Patricia Reed. Co-facilitating together with them will of course as always be the wonderful synth nerd Maeve Devine aka @Quieting___ ethereal techno witch and DIY hardcore punk veteran.
This workshop will focus on the relation between attention and noise, covering a great many ways this can be conceived, from the entropic distraction machines of social media and AI slop to the forms of exclusionary sociality that organise what we consider as irrelevance or interference. Amidst this 24/7-nonstop-ultraconnected-endless-hyperexposure we want to investigate the critical use of noise as a force for the possible ethical-aesthetic resistance, disruption and transformation of the social infrastructures and norms that support and maintain this capture and exploitation of attention.
To foster consciousness of noise, not just sonically but socially and politically, is to defy the pull of distractive attractors and fly free from the restrictive regulation of focus. Neurodiverse revolutionaries and allies against perceptual normativity, let us together foment a revolt against metastasizing brainrot and the maintenance of power through the attentional organisation of significance!We propose to begin with a four-day ‘strike’ against the distraction economy: this means we reject oppressive working conditions of constant digital delirium and we resist demands for the drudgery of focused concentration alike. Together we will empty the slop bucket, pack away the doom scrolls, and get on with the serious business of careful and deliberate noise.
During the workshop each member of the union will give a short presentation on the question of attention and noise and how this issue crosses concerns in their work. Like SSTRAPP, the NRU is deeply committed to collective thinking through the use of diagrams, and we’ll aim to produce new diagrams together with the workshop participants, which will be published in the NRU’s ongoing series of zines. In the practice-based part of the workshop we’ll work on synthesizers, samplers, loopers and drum machines, dj controllers, effects pedals, acoustic instruments and found objects to make jagged waves, weird soundscapes, off-kilter beats and sublime noise. We’ll collect and distort field recordings, do attentive and distractive listening sessions, and work in small groups towards performances on Saturday night.
All of the NRU have worked on issues surrounding noise and attention in various ways: Martina Raponi’s last book Psofotopias (Noise: Sounding Out the Unheard) explores sound beyond aurality and audibility, and those zones of uncertainty and ambiguity, or spaces of noise and confusion positioned between the utopian and the dystopian. Sonia de Jager has worked on semantic noise with regard to computing and machine learning, mystical experiences and social scripts in the context of contemporary cognitive science, and has recently co-written a paper together with Inigo and Jimena Clavel Vasquez on the concept of active ignorance, which describes the role of attention in socially structured forms of bias, repression and denial, bringing arguments from epistemic injustice and critical race theory together with current neuroscientific theories.
Mattin is an artist, musician and theorist working primarily with noise and improvisation, his performances often aim to provoke social unease and conceptual friction, his recently published book Social Dissonance presents an analysis of how the modern subject is engulfed in a noise from above (suprapersonal processes such as capitalist ideology) and below (subpersonal neurocompuational processes), and he is the co-editor of the books Noise and Capitalism, and Abolishing Capitalist Totality. Cecile Malaspina’s book, An Epistemology of Noise, examines the ambiguity of the concept of noise, from information entropy to normative uncertainty and the mental state of noise.
Miguel Prado’s book The Noise in Noise: Uncertainty, Randomness and Control understands noise as a form-creating force that enables cognition and shapes human-machine interaction, more recently he has written a piece in which he diagnoses our present cultural and political condition in terms of what he calls Entropic Modernity (a hypertrophied aftershock of postmodernity). Inigo Wilkins forthcoming book Irreversible Noise is a wide-ranging account of the many meanings of the concept of noise, and its uses across philosophy, science, politics and music, with a central focus on the contemporary statistical form of social power in political economy and cognitive science, and the ideological abuses of randomness and noise that stem from it.
Patricia Reed’s work addresses social transformations of coexistence at planetary dimensions, focusing on the interactions between world-models and practices of inhabitation, she has written on planetary spacialization and the intelligibility of incompleteness. Under the collective name Laboria Cuboniks she co-wrote the Xenofeminist manifesto (XF), which is a rationalist, anti-naturalist, and technomaterialist framework aiming to repurpose technologies to dismantle gender, race, and class, it treats the ‘natural’ as a patriarchal construct, and alienation as a positive impetus for social transformation. Drawing on cybernetic concepts, XF views noise or breakdown in technological systems as a strategic opening to intervene in techno-capitalism.
Diagram from Patricia Reed’s The End of a World and its Pedagogies
Laboria Cuboniks’s Xenofeminist Manifesto
Practical Details
SSTRAPP is held at a fantastic venue called Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre (BOARC).
BOARC is an anti-racist, trans-inclusive, intersectional feminist space where we welcome everyone who abides by this accountability agreement.
There are no requirements for attending SSTRAPP, everyone is welcome, whatever their knowledge, abilities, etc., and the theory and practice should be accessible for those with no background in them.
We recommend arriving at BOARC on Thursday morning so we’re ready to start working at 11am, but if you can’t make it then you can still join later, we’ll finish on Sunday afternoon. If you’d like to arrive the day before or stay some extra days that should be possible, just let us know so we can book you in for extra nights with BOARC (£30 per night).
The cost for participating in the workshop includes three nights accommodation and breakfast, lunch and dinner on all four days.
Workshop fee: £444
There are a limited number of lower priced places available, so if you’d like to come but can’t afford this price because of genuine economic hardship then please get in touch and we’ll see what we can do to make it possible for you.
Since its inception SSTRAPP has always been about making sonic and somatic theory and practice available outside of increasingly expensive and restrictive academic institutions, and we’re strongly committed to including people at the intersections of forms of oppression crossing class, race, gender, ability, etc.
If you’d like to join, please get in touch by sending an email including some details about your background and interest to sstrapp@proton.me