Alpha, Isis, Eden: Listening event

Saturday 4 March 2017,
3.30–8pm,
with a prompt start at 4pm

The Showroom
63 Penfold Street
London NW8 8PQ

As part of Laura Oldfield Ford : Alpha, Isis, Eden exhibition at The Showroom Gallery, John Wild will present two sound compositions from the CODED GEOMETRY archive. The first, ‘Drone Planes Over Westfield’, explores the paranoia that surrounded the London Olympics, as anti-aircraft missiles were stationed on the top of East London tower blocks. The second, “Robin Hood Gardens – ANTI-GENTRIFICATION GHOST DANCE’, was produced through field recordings of electromagnetic emissions recorded on a drift around the estate as compulsory purchase orders were being enforced, slowly clearing the estate. This piece represents a brutalist record of one moment in the ongoing clearances hallucinated as an insurrectionary carnival of resistance.

Full event text

Laura Oldfield Ford has invited a group of artists, writers, theorists, musicians, activists and other practitioners including Majed Aslam, Janina Lange, Jack Latham, Frances Morgan, Fay Nicolson, Francesca Panetta and John Wild to participate in a collective listening and discussion event that responds to the auditory textures of the city, crossing between the sonic and the spatial. The event will also feature a 2015 audio work by the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher.

By exploring the politics of sound, sound essays, thinking about the liminal, thresholds, conduits and crossings, Oldfield Ford is interested in how people negotiate the psychic terrain of the city. Themes that the event touches upon are forensic architecture; sound as assertion of territory and as a political strategy; and the experiential, including how we experience and move through space. By bringing people from diverse backgrounds together Oldfield Ford aims to offer new perspectives on how we feel and hear the city.

Programme

3.30pm: Arrival
4pm: Introduction by Laura Oldfield Ford and listening contributions
5pm: Break
5.30pm: Listening contributions
6.30pm: Discussion
7–8pm: Drinks and DJ sets by Majed Aslam and Jack Latham