Son[i]a #397
Open-weather
Sophie Dyer and Sasha Engelmann during an Open-weather workshop
Researcher-designer Sophie Dyer and creative geographer Sasha Engelmann co-lead Open-weather, a collaborative project that revolves around imaging and imagining the Earth and its weather systems through experiments in amateur radio, open data and feminist tactics of sensing and séance.
Operating within a rich and diverse ecology of practices at the intersection of DIY technology, pedagogy and art, open-weather encompasses artworks, workshops and how-to guides, in which feminist principles are as important as the technicalities of antennas, software and laptops. The duo’s feminist approach to sensing and reading satellite imagery challenges dominant representations of Earth and the environment, bringing the body into play and complicating ideas of the weather beyond the meteorological.
In this two-voice podcast, speculative storytelling weaves through glitchy weather satellite transmissions in a dialogue tinged with the feminist meta-practices that run deep beneath Sophie and Sasha’s collective operations. Together, they talk about NOAA satellites, about building alliances and about weather literacy, occasionally interviewing each other as friends and guiding us through the generous network of feminist thinkers that informs their practice.
This podcast is part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union. Coproduced by Sonic Acts.
Conversation: Albert Tarrats and Anna Ramos. Script and sound production: Albert Tarrats. Voice over: Javiera Cadiz. Sounds from WDR recordings. Photo: Gemma Planell.
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Deed | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
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Reni Hofmüller
In the 1990s, twenty minutes was all it took for local authorities in the Austrian city of Graz to detect and neutralise any illegal radio transmitter. Back then, Reni Hofmüller was part of a group of activists who took over the airwaves with pirate broadcasts every Sunday from the mountains surrounding the city. After short 18-minute sessions, the Radio Dauerwelle team would pack up its equipment and clear out, moments before the authorities arrived. In this podcast, Hofmüller shares her early commitment with radio, as well as her obsession with dismantling the invisible in order to understand and question it. A trip through time that takes us from the 1980s to the present, through her personal involvement in feminist discussions from the perspective of new media. Our conversation is riddled with references to her commitment to open source, to doing things together, to the uninhibited mixing of disciplines, and to her passion for the electromagnetic sphere and bicycles.
Antye Greie (AGF)
Antye Greie (aka AGF or poemproducer) is a poet, activist, sound artist, sound sculptor, and curator, born in East Germany and based on the island of Hailuoto in northern Finland for over fifteen years. In this podcast, we talk to Antye Greie about language, sound, and the body. At their intersection, the voice emerges, with its multiple resonances and different ways of introducing the voice of others through her own practice and space of visibility. Along the way, we look at her work and methodology, from the deconstruction of texts to the implementation of what she calls “feminist sonic technologies”.
Femke Snelting
Possible Bodies questions and problematises the formulation, conception, and rendering of bodies across different 3D technologies such as modelling, tracking and scanning. Their affirmative critical research draws attention to the ways in which these techniques end up implementing and even amplifying a host of prejudices based on race, gender, class, age and ability which, far from being circumstantial, are woven into the actual source code of all sorts of applications. We talk to Femke Snelting about embodiments, optimisation, and 3D disasters, about the possible and the probable, parametric interfaces, and open standards, and about disobedient action research.
Nicole L'Huillier
Chilean artist Nicole L'Huillier formulates an antidisciplinary practice that takes up a position on boundaries, generating a liminal and sensorial space in which categories such as architecture, science, music and sound tend to break down and intertwine. Thinking with “surlogics”—the logic of her native south— Nicole defends the need to use multiple kinds of thinking at the same time, and embraces mestizaje, as a way of being and existing that is rich and full of complexity and contradictions. In this podcast, we open up Nicole L'Huillier’s processes, methodologies, and rituals, in conversation with old friends—Gloria Anzaldúa, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gabriela Mistral, AM Kanngiesser—and strangers. Their membrane-words caress and jolt us. Sounds, vibrations, resonance, structures, and other multiple sensorial transductions invite us to think up, amidst murmuring, other collective ways of being and incarnations.