Son[i]a #328 Charles Bernstein

A grain of rice sits in a field on the banks of the Mekong river. A water buffalo breaks up soil in the Ifugao terraces in the Philippines. A black box containing rice seeds is placed on a shelf inside the Svalbard seed vault at -18°C in Norway. From such a common seed, hidden in plain sight, artist-scholar Elaine Gan weaves a dynamic network of relationships connecting agroecology and more-than-human sociability, subsistence farmers and climate change, contaminated taxonomies and feminist theory.In this podcast, Elaine Gan talks about crop science, feral technologies, the global pandemic, radical difference, the art of noticing, Matsutake mushrooms, and, of course, the blahblahsphere.

Hugo Esquinca’s work is a multi-layered crust, intentionally obfuscated through excess, deliberately hard to peel. Scraping off layers of obfuscation in this dense network of transductive interactions gets you nowhere, cause those layers are precisely what Hugo uses in order to expose you (and himself) to a sort of sensory overload. We discuss with Hugo how growing up in the hyperchaos of Mexico City relates to his fascination with speed, overabundance and syncretism. 

Ji Youn Kang’s abstract compositions are infused with her personal blend of Western experimental sound and Korean ritual music. This hybrid background also seeps into her live performances, where she explores the primitive and empowering rhythmic structures of Korean shamanism –often building up from slow to fast– and noisy sound through an amalgam of handmade analogue devices, acoustic instruments, and digital signal processing techniques. In this podcast, Ji talks about Korean ritual music, perfect 5ths and nature, resonating objects, noise, self-built instruments, uncertainty and tension, Wave Field Synthesis, and strategies to engage online audiences in meaningful communication.