Curating Noise: Reverberations and the Polyvocal
SFSIA 2021 | sonsbeek20→24 conjunctions

Faculty Bios

Amal Alhaag (1983) is an Amsterdam-based independent curator, dj, and researcher who develops ongoing experimental and collaborative research practice, public programs, and projects on global spatial politics, archives, colonialism, counter-culture, oral histories, and popular culture. Her projects and collaborations with people, initiatives, and institutions invite, stage, question, and play with “uncomfortable” issues that riddle, rewrite, remix, share, and compose narratives in impermanent settings.

Ina Blom is a professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo and Wigeland Visiting Professor in the Department of Art History, University of Chicago. Recent books include The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (New York: Sternberg Press, 2016), On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture  (New York: Sternberg Press, 2007/2009) as well as the edited volumes Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social (Amsterdam University Press, 2016) and Raoul Hausmann et les avant-gardes (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2014).

Mathieu Copeland has been developing a curatorial practice that seeks to subvert the traditional role of exhibitions and renew our perceptions of them. He edited the publication ‘Choreographing Exhibitions’ (Les presses du reel), and co-edited the radical anthology ‘The Anti-Museum’ (König Books). Copeland has organized, among many other exhibitions, ‘Soundtrack for an Exhibition’ and ‘Alan Vega’s Retrospective’ both at the MAC Lyon (respectively 2006 and 2009), ‘VOIDS. A Retrospective’ in 2009 at Centre Pompidou and Kunsthalle Bern, ‘Phill Niblock’s Retrospective’ at Circuit & Musée de l’Elysée Lausanne in 2013, and ‘the exhibition of a film’ an exhibition as a feature film for cinemas in 2015. Copeland’s forthcoming “A Staged Exhibition” will premiere at Ferme du Buisson on the 11^th of September 2021. He is most recently the editor of ‘Gustav Metzger: Writings (1953-2016)’, an anthology of more than 350 texts that defined the artist’s worldview and work.

Christoph Cox is a philosopher, critic, and curator of visual and sonic art. He teaches modern and contemporary philosophy and art theory at Hampshire College, where he also serves as vice president for academic affairs and as the dean of faculty. He is the author of Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (University of California Press, 1999), and co-editor of Realism Materialism Art (Sternberg, 2015) and Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum, 2004/2017). Christoph is editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine and his writing has appeared in October, Artforum, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Journal of Visual Culture, Organised Sound, and elsewhere. He has curated exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Kitchen, CONTEXT Art Miami, New Langton Arts, G Fine Art Gallery, and other venues.

Sanne Krogh Groth holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of Copenhagen (2010) and is the author of the book Politics and Aesthetics in Electronic Music (Kehrer; 2014). Her recent field of research includes performative aspects of sound art and contemporary music, about which she has recently completed a research project affiliated with the Royal Library in Copenhagen. She is an associate professor of Musicology at Lund University, Sweden, and editor-in-chief of the Danish/English online journal Seismograf.org.

Paz Guevara is a curator, researcher and author, born in Santiago, Chile. Currently she works at Haus der Kulturen der Welt – HKW in Berlin, Germany, where she collaborates in the long-term project Kanon-Fragen that questions the dominant cultural narratives and for which she curated Afro-Sonic Mapping: Tracing Aural Histories via Sonic Transmigrations (2019) by artist and musician Satch Hoyt and co-curated Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017-18). In 2011 and 2013, she co-curated the Latin American Pavilion at the 54th and 55th Venice Biennale. Guevara has conducted several conversations with cultural practitioners; most recently, she has published conversations with Elicura Chihuailaf (NIRIN NGAAY, Biennale of Sydney, 2020) and Marcela Moraga (Villa Romana, Florence, 2020). She lectures on Exhibitions Histories at the MA Raumstrategien at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule in Berlin.

Satch Hoyt is a visual artist and musician currently living in Berlin. His practice is related to the transnational African diaspora, and it is centered in the cultural and political role of sonicity. During 2017-2019, he developed the research project Afro-Sonic Mapping. Tracing Aural Histories via Sonic Transmigrations at HKW in Berlin, and in 2017 he conceived and presented the radio program Unpacking Sonic Migrations From Slaveship to Spaceship at SAAVY FUNK, part of documenta14. His work has been presented extensively, such as in Get Up, Stand Up Now – Generations of Black Creative Pioneers, Somerset House, London (2019); Respect: Hip Hop Style and Wisdom, Oakland Museum of California (2018); Dak’Art Biennial (2018); and The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, Prospect 4 Triennial, New Orleans (2017). Recent performances include Burnt Sugar, the Arkestra Chamber, Lincoln Center NYC (2019); It’s After the End of the World in collaboration with Annika Larsson (2019); and Hair Combing Cycle Performance (2017-on going). Hoyt has collaborated on compositions with Grace Jones, noteworthy is 7-Day Weekend, which is on the triple platinum soundtrack album of the Eddie Murphy movie Boomerang, and with Louis Bourgeois and Ramuntcho Matta on Otte. Since 2001, Hoyt is the flute-percussion chair in the NYC-based collective Burnt Sugar, the Arkestra Chamber. He is currently working on various projects, which includes the 2021 release of the Afro-Sonic Mapping album and composing the music and album for Kiluanji Kia Henda’s Reprograming the Birds Memory.

Cécile Malaspina is directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, and Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. She is the author of An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury 2018) and principal translator of Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Minnesota University Press 2017).  She completed her PhD in Philosophy, Epistemology and History of Science and Technology at Paris 8 Denis Diderot, under the supervision of Alain Leplège and Iain Hamilton Grant, and obtained her MA in Contemporary French Philosophy & Critical Theory from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), UK.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer whose work immerses audiences in a blend of genres, global culture, and environmental and social issues. Miller has collaborated with an array of recording artists, including Metallica, Chuck D, Steve Reich, and Yoko Ono. His 2018 album, DJ Spooky Presents: Phantom Dancehall, debuted at #3 on Billboard Reggae. His large-scale, multimedia performance pieces include “Rebirth of a Nation,” Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Seoul Counterpoint, written during his 2014 residency at Seoul Institute of the Arts. His multimedia project Sonic Web premiered at San Francisco’s Internet Archive in 2019. Miller’s artwork has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, The Venice Biennial for Architecture, the Miami/Art Basel fair, and many other museums and galleries. His books include the award-winning Rhythm Science, published by MIT Press in 2004; Sound Unbound, an anthology about digital music and media; The Book of Ice, a visual and acoustic portrait of the Antarctic, and; The Imaginary App, on how apps changed the world. His writing has been published by The Village Voice, The Source, and Artforum, and he was the first founding Executive Editor of Origin Magazine.

Having studied photography, neuroscience, medicine and architecture, Warren Neidich brings to any discussion platform a unique interdisciplinary position that he calls “trans-thinking.” He currently uses video and neon to create cross pollinating conceptual text-based works that reflect upon situations at the border zone of art, science and social justice. His performative and sculptural work Pizzagate Neon (2018), recently on display at the Venice Biennial 2019, analyzed through a large hanging neon sculpture the relations of Fake News, networked attention economy, evolving techno-cultural habitus and the co-evolving architecture of the brain. His recent conceptual project Drive-By-Art (Public Sculpture in This Moment of Social Distancing) just opened on the South Fork of Long Island and Los Angeles to some acclaim including reviews in the NY Times, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, Time Out and LA Magazine. He is founder and director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (2015-), a theory intensive postgraduate course that attracts students worldwide operating in Los Angeles, NYC and Berlin. Additionally he was a tutor in the departments of visual art, computer science and cultural studies at Goldsmith College London as well as recently serving as Professor of Art at the Weissensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin. He has been a visiting lecturer at the departments of art at Brown University, GSD Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, Southern California Institute of Architecture, UCLA, La Sorbonne Paris, University of Oxford and Cambridge University, UK. He is American editor of Archive Books and author of over 20 books. His recent books include The Glossary of Cognitive Activism, Archive Books, Berlin, and Neuromacht (in German) Merve, Leipzig.

Pablo José Ramírez is a curator, art writer and cultural theorist living and working in Guatemala and Amsterdam. He is the Adjunct Curator of First Nations and Indigenous Art at Tate Modern. His work revisits post-colonial societies to consider non-western ontologies, indigeneity, forms of racial occlusion, and sound. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2015 he co-curated with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill the 19th Bienal Paiz: Trans-visible. Among his recent exhibitions are: La Medida del Silencio, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, NuMu, Guatemala (2020); The Shores of the World: on communality and interlingual politics, Display, Prague (2018); Guatemala Después, co-curator, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons School of Design, New York (2016); This Might be a Place, co-curator, Center for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2014). He has lectured extensively including at the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, FKA Witte de With, Gasworks, MAMM, University of Glasgow, University of Cape Town, Simon Fraser University, The New School and ParaSite. Ramirez was the recipient of the 2019 Independent Curators International/CPPC Award for Central America and the Caribbean and is currently the Editor in Chief and co-founder of Infrasonica, a curatorial platform dedicated to the research around non-western sonic cultures. Ramirez is part of the curatorial team of the Carnegie International 58th.

Holger Schulze (*1970) is full professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen and principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. He serves as co-editor of the international journal for historical anthropology Paragrana and as founding editor of the book series Sound Studies. His research focuses on the cultural history of the senses, sound in popular culture and the anthropology of media. He is a founding member of the European Sound Studies Association. Between 2012-2018 he was an associated investigator at the cluster of excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung: an interdisciplinary laboratory at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; between 2008-2016 he was director of the international research network Sound in Media Culture, and between 2000-2009 he was a co-founder and the first head of department of the first European MA-programme in Sound Studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He was invited visiting professor at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo, at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, at the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, and at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He served as a curator for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin and he produced radio features for Deutschlandradio Kultur. He writes for Merkur, Seismograf, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Positionen, Texte zur Kunst, taz – die tageszeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, der freitag.

Greg Tate is a writer, musician and cultural provocateur who lives on Harlem’s Sugar Hill. His books include Flyboy In The Buttermilk (1992), Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix And The Black Experience (2003), Everything But The Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture (2004) and Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader (2016). Since 1999, Tate has also led the Conducted Improv band Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber whose latest release is Angels Over Oakanda on the group’s Avant Groidd Musica imprint. Tate is a proud member of Howard University’s Bison Nation and has been Visiting Faculty at Yale, Columbia, Brown, Williams, Princeton (where he taught “The Loud Black And Proud Musicology of Amiri Baraka”) and NYU, where he debuted the course “A BrIef History of Woke Black Music.” In 2022, Duke University Press will publish White Cube Fever: Writings and Conjurations on The Dark Arts, a collection of his writings on visual culture.

Victoria Vesna, Ph.D., is an Artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design Media  Arts and Director of the Art|Sci Center at the School of the Arts and California NanoSystems  Institute (CNSI). Although she was trained early on as a painter (Faculty of Fine arts, University  of Belgrade, 1984), her curious mind took her on an exploratory path that resulted in work that can be defined as experimental creative research residing between disciplines and technologies. With her installations she investigates how communication technologies affect collective behavior and perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation (PhD, University of  Wales, 2000). Her work involves long-term collaborations with composers, nano-scientists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists and she brings this experience to students. She incorporates sound and frequencies as primal in her installation and online work and teaches a master seminar “Vibrations Matter: Art and Science of Deep Listening.” Victoria has exhibited her work in 20+ solo exhibitions, 70+ group shows, has been published in  20+ papers and gave 100+ invited talks in the last decade. She is the North American editor of AI & Society journal (Springer Verlag, UK) and in 2007 published an edited volume – Database  Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (Minnesota Press) and another in 2011, Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts. (co-edited with Christiane Paul and  Margot Lovejoy) Intellect Ltd, 2011. Currently she is working on a series Art Science &  Technology based on her online lecture class and the Hox Zodiac cookbook in collaboration  with neuroscientist Siddharth Ramakrishnan.

Anuradha Vikram is a Los Angeles-based writer, curator, and educator. Vikram is co-curator (with UCLA Art Sci Center director Victoria Vesna) of the upcoming Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption (opening 2024), and guest curator for The Craft Contemporary (fka CAFAM) of the upcoming solo retrospective Jaishri Abichandani: Flower-Headed Children (opening 2022). Her book, “Decolonizing Culture,” is a collection of seventeen essays that address questions of race and gender parity in contemporary art spaces (Art Practical/Sming Sming Books, 2017). Vikram is faculty in the UCLA Department of Art and at USC Roski School of Art and Design. She is a member of the editorial board for X-TRA, an advising editor for Curationist, and an editor for X Topics, an imprint of X Artists’ Books.