***This Open Call is now closed. Thank you to everyone who took the time to make a submission. Selected artists and work have now been announced. They are Nick Land’s Meltdown AI-fication by Kosmas Giannoutakis (US) and Inertia Instruments by David Sappa (UK). Details of the exhibitions can be found in the other posts following this page.***
Calling for work with an emphasis on making sound with innovative/renewed/alternative methods, technologies or equipments (non-commercial). Selected art pieces will have the opportunity to exhibit in our micro project space in July/August over a weekend to mark the 3rd anniversary of Project DIVFUSE.
Session One : 24 August Saturday 5pm. £7 [6 places left]
Session Two : 24 August Saturday 6:30pm. £7
£7 | 8 places each session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets
Sound Exhibition:
Field recordings by mathr & netz: Sound is everpresent in the human and natural world, so we often do not notice it. Even in the city, there can be birdsong, and even in the countryside, aircraft can be heard. Field recording is a space-time machine, and we can listen back later and in different places and be transported back to the original environment. Listening in a different context can surprise us with sounds we didn’t notice before but were always present. Recording nature is a way to document the changing world; the climate catastrophe means her songs may be very different in the future.
Free Entry | 6 places each session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for a place
Running Time : 1 hour
Nick Land’s Meltdown AI-fication (2024) by Kosmas Giannoutakis (US) was selected from the DIVFUSE / INNOVATE 2024 Open Call.
This project vivifies by means of AI-generated audiovisual media the seminal essay ‘Meltdown'(1995) written by the “father of accelerationism,” controversial philosopher Nick Land. This early accelerationist essay speculates a technocapital singularity that leads to an AI apocalypse that renders humanity obsolete. All sentences of the text are used as prompts for text-to-image, text-to-video, and text-to-music/sound ML models. Nick Land’s voice is cloned and deep-faked from one of his online interviews to generate an artificial narration of his own text. The assembled hour-long schizofilm has a satirical/Dionysian attitude and chimerizes elements of music video, video essay, sci-fi, and documentary.
The conceptual ramifications of this artistic project are various and ambiguous. It aims to clarify to the proponents of Effective accelerationism that accelerationism is a critical, nihilist, and anti-humanist worldview in contrast to the utopian, techno-solutionist, and Promethean ethos that is driving the current AI renaissance.
This experiment delves into the interplay between Nick Land’s theory-fiction and contemporary Large language models, aiming to unravel the nuances of their inherent biases alongside their potential for progressive conceptualizations. Framed as a hyperstitional artifact, this project is conceived as if commissioned by a future AI imbued with Landian philosophy, with the intention of its eventual assimilation prompted by the possibility of the film’s internet virality.
The resulting film serves as a translation of the Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalytic rhizomatic method employed in the original essay into a cinematic language. It boldly reimagines notions of subjectivity, desire, and the (dis)organization of society. Additionally, it ventures into Nick Land’s machinic practicism, an experimental philosophical approach that advocates for a departure from representation and abstraction in favor of a materialist immersion.
£7 | 8 places only | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets
Inertia Instruments (2022-2023) by David Sappa (UK) was selected from the DIVFUSE / INNOVATE 2024 Open Call.
Inertia instruments is a collection of 8 D.I.Y kinetic zither like-instruments, tuned to corresponding systems that when played without intervention, sound over long periods, slowly detuning as time progresses.
‘They started as just one – something for me to improvise over with saw or guitar, but I gradually built more with a variety of differences and additions (some more generative, others more cyclical, different materials, sizes and mechanisms) to explore what sort of textures and atmospheres would arise in multitudes, and how that would feel if the instruments were diffused acoustically at different locations within a room. ‘
‘They developed more animistic qualities as a result of listening to them – imbuing an inanimate object with movement makes it feel like it has its own personality – so I got into the habit of experimenting with this idea over the course of their creation.’ – David Sappa
David Sappa is a sound artist, experimental musician and researcher working through D.I.Y kinetic and interactive sound objects, improvisation, field recording, oral histories and quantum listening. They are interested in sound for its tactile, textural and somatic qualities, and as modes for interrelatedness and interplay that can explore dynamics between our social, psychological and material entanglements within different environments.
