Son[i]a #312
Lars Holdhus/TCF
![Son[i]a #312](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/mush.jpg)
This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Produced in collaboration with Next Festival/A4. Music by Lars Holdhus/TCF.
TCF works as an entropic self-referential system, conspicuous and withdrawn to the public, that takes shape in a vast span of mediums –from tea to sound, to a chatbot or even DNA strings–. Keyholder and administrator of this unique information system is artist and musician Lars Holdhus, aka TCF, who interrogates our relation to the technological infrastructures that permeate contemporaneity through language, code, cryptography and, most recently, ecology.
For the last few years, the Norwegian born artist has been going through a personal process of confrontation with the materialistic conditions involved in his artistic practice. A paradigm shift that is tilting the axis of his work from future to present, from reactiveness to sheer presence, in deep alignment with Buddhist postulates.
Becoming self-sufficient and lowering your impact on the environment whilst still being an active agent of the contemporary art world, calls for alternative modes of distribution, production and consumption. Biota, his on-going project with David Ainley, is an example of where his energies are at the moment. Biota works as a newsletter focusing on ecology and practical solutions for a more sustainable life. Late 2019 Lars confessed to us: “The last month I just picked mushrooms”. Maybe, the answer is in mushrooms.
In this podcast, Lars Holdhus advocates for presence and awareness. Between tea sips, he reflects on toolmaking and impact, A.I. and the obsession with flesh, human time and machine time. He also points out how boring technology becomes when you are 70% Buddhist, while introducing us to his latest projects: a virtual touring software teasing the limits of the live music industry and a random processing tool that he feeds and confronts to compose and create images.
2020. All rights reserved. © by the artist and respective publishers.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with sound artist Lars Holdhus that we were unable to include the first time around.
David Burraston
Artist/scientist David Burraston talks about his rainwire project and how using rain as a creative medium has led him to an ongoing research that could overcome some recognized shortcomings in the field of rainfall measurements. He also talks about complex systems and creative practice in science, with an overview of CA and its applications, including his findings on CA rule space self-organization using modular synthesizers and CA sequencers.
Goodiepal & Pals
Goodiepal plays a borrowed Casiotone VL-1 VL-Tone and we talk about art's failure to have real impact, the best place to hide stuff, contracts and hacks, double standards in Europe, creativity in sheer survival strategies, Climate refugees, genocides in the making, modern afro-futurism, Radical Computer Music and circuit bending.
Nanna Thylstrup
Nanna Thylstrup talks about the digitalisation of the archive and its implications. She deeply analyses two consequences that both emerge in individual and collective spheres: first, the data shadow that big data contexts generates to each user; second, the politics behind the processes of mass digitalisation.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Goodiepal that we were unable to include the first time around.