Sonic Acts

Anthea Caddy is a Tasmanian-born and now Berlin-based experimental cellist and sound artist who explores projected sound energy through spatial practices that highlight acoustic and physical phenomena. In this podcast, Anthea walks us through her journey from playing cello in rock bands as a teenager to her ongoing research into projected sound energy. She explains her long-term research on directional speakers and the results of the iterations and testing of the parabolic speakers. She also talks about documentation and about the difficulties of approaching large-scale sound performance.

We dig up some unreleased bits of our conversation with the Tasmanian-born, Berlin-based experimental cellist and sound artist Anthea Caddy. We talk about the dialogue between her practice and science and academia, but also about infrasound, long wave data, mirrors, reflection, the ungraspable and the negotiation with the environment and space.

In this podcast, we talk to the Mexican artist Juan Arturo García about language and plants—or about how taxonomy overwrote one tradition of thought and replaced it with another, by way of Latin. Which is, paradoxically, a dead imperial language. We take a close look at his practice, concentrating on the role of speculation, fiction, and the archive in the way his stories come together. We talk about the emergence of neutral Spanish, and Juan Arturo tells us about the first stages of a film that explores the strange arrival of a nuclear reactor in Colombia around 1950.

In this podcast, Singaporean organizer, writer, and scholar Charmaine Chua shares her research on the containerization of global logistics from the vantage of the Global South. Her journey begins aboard a container ship, embodying ethnographic observation and field work, as well as a radical rereading of the naval archive records of the colonial project. The mix of methodologies, experiences and data highlights the incongruities and the environmental, legal, and labour abuses that appear in the capitalist wet dream of efficiency in global trade.