Group items tagged

Can you really detain people because their phones are beeping? And when you cannot tell who is protesting, is it still a protest?

"arrangements of performative objects, Acoustic Sound Blankets, are embroidered with patterns that have been in Khan's family for generations. Women archive and embroider these artifacts when one is born, married, or passing. Holes are cut out to appear like the patterns on holy books. In previous performances for the camera, Khan has invited people to share intimacies, seek safety underneath these blankets concealing, like the veil. Since recent protests, it has become a common activity to meet in groups to make protest banners and, in many instances, holes are cut out of fabric to allow protesters to wear messages in lieu of holding signs. Khan has since received emails from activists requesting acoustic blankets to protect themselves from sound waves from military shock bombs used to break up crowds."

This article explores the gendered sound world of anti-abortion protests outside U.S. abortion clinics. These clinics are spaces of dissent where, on a daily basis, protesters congregate to vocalize their opposition to abortion. We employ the concept of sonic patriarchy, the sonic counterpart to the male gaze, to explore how anti-abortion protesting dominates the aural space surrounding abortion clinics and is used as a vehicle for controlling gendered bodies. P

"Almost 200 recordings of international protests are now archived in an online sound map that spans over two decades."

A site that accumulates NYPD police scanners. Created to aid protesters.

As you're tuning your speakers in preparation for Live in Concert, listen to "RAGE (After Tokyo 2020)," DJ Mars89's new mix in response to the Tokyo Olympics-and in opposition to hollow celebrations of national identity and false displays of unity. Moving between speeches, industrial noise, deconstructions of traditional Japanese instruments, and protest music, Mars89 channels the widespread anger at the Olympics: a self-aggrandizing indulgence pushed through by the country's elites during a pandemic, at incredible cost to the people. The mix is published as part of Unknown States, an issue devoted to the fictions that give rise to nations and nationalities.

Sounds are ever present: They envelop and permeate us, consolidating, dissolving and complicating relationships. Through a genuine agency of their own, sounds can articulate protest or approval, serve as a political statement or thought, and establish ties between people, entities and environments.

"Ultra-red pursue a fragile but dynamic exchange between art and political organising. Through the performance of a militant sound investigation, the audio collective map contested spaces and histories as an articulation of social relations. Drawing on the formal strategies of early Conceptualism, We Come from Your Future facilitates a particular kind of discursive action whose performance of announcing and denouncing constitute an intervention. We Come from Your Future is comprised of two episodes in which Ultra-red ask, "What are the sounds of anti-racism?" Posing this question in the context of anti-racist and migrant organizing in the UK, the first episode features a set of dispatches that combine audio compositions with accompanying field reports. These online dispatches lead up to and inform an on-site event as part of the Triennial Prologues: Altermodern at Tate Britain on June 28. "

Having students understand ideas of expansiveness, asymmetry, and non-linearity as central to black cultural expression and critique-even as artists refuse to sacrifice an expressed political commitment to black resistance-begins to suggest ways for students to contemplate the intersection of identity politics with the unexpected, fantastic elements of expression that lie outside of more recent flattened diagnoses of black nationalism."

"This is a zine on sound weaponry use by police. It offers tips on scene assessment and readiness for exposure to the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) at public demonstrations. It also offers some history on police sound and a little bit of info about general acoustic trauma."

We Come From Your Future is a sound investigation into the future of anti-racism in the UK. It asks how the public discourse on ethnicotherness, diversity, and multiculturalism may contribute to the very conditions of racism? How has the erasure of terms like anti-racism, racist violence, and justice from the official bureaucratic language actually worked to both conceal and foment new convergences of racial tension? How has the composition and re-composition of migration in the UK contributed to new lines of anti-racist experience and opened up to new fields of struggle? What are the obstacles for a re-constitution of an anti-racist movement?

"To read Susan Sontag's 2003 essay, Regarding the Pain of Others, with pencil scribbling references to current-day wars is to be expected. Hers is a profound rethinking of the intersection of news, art and contemporary depictions of violence and our memories of them. So, too, could the word "Ferguson" be readily jotted in the margins. Meandering the intersections helps us navigate memory well beyond any of the recent conflagrations between Black citizens and militarized police forces in U.S. cities. "

"What does it sound like to look for a lost loved one? This art installation doesn't look away from the horror and pain of that reality. At University Museum Contemporary Art in Mexico City last year, multiple speakers wrapped visitors in a sonic collage, recorded from a group of civilians, made up of mostly women, who search the desert for "clandestine graves" of missing loved ones."

"The Vienna-based group Iraqi Autumn draws attention to the international community's silence regarding the outbreak of violence in Iraq over the past two months."

"For this performance, an ensemble of vocalists will interpret Raven Chacon's American Ledger No. 3 (2020), a score devoted to the journalist and anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells. Chacon, an artist, composer, and musician from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, often creates compositions in the form of graphic scores, trading traditional notation for visual symbols to be interpreted by performers, whether individually or collectively. In addition to utilizing his scores in performances, Chacon presents them as artworks, calling on viewers to interpret the symbols in much the same way as musicians."