Desde hace un tiempo los newsletter se están llenado de preocupantes noticias sobre los recortes presupuestarios a la cultura en Holanda. Por fin, tras todos ellos, nos llega la progración de la siguiente edición de Sonic Acts.

Travelling Time is the fourteenth edition of Sonic Acts, and its theme is the human experience of time. Time dictates our schedule; time gives us structure. We think of ourselves as living in the present, with the past behind us, moving towards the future. But in fact, there is nothing so complex and ambiguous as time: the arrival the early twentieth century of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics has tampered with our straightforward concept of time. The ongoing development and application of technology is challenging, changing and destabilising our sense of time. Communication networks function at light speed and processes are handled in real time by computers operating without human intervention. These technological advances have produced a gap between ‘machine time’ and ‘human time’.

Art, film and music all have the ability to make abstract concepts of time tangible and comprehensible; they can all manipulate time. In art, a relationship between time and movement creates a sense of space and can identify differences and correspondences between machine time and lived time. In Travelling Time, montage, rhythm and composition in sound and image will intensify the experience of time. Travelling Time is also about the need to act quickly in improvised music; the inevitable slowness of programming or constructing an artwork; time travels and art as a vehicle for imaginary journeys; and art as an artefact from bygone times. Sonic Acts XIV Travelling Time is a quest for space, detail and meaning in time.

Sonic Acts XIV is a four-day festival of performances, lectures, exhibitions, presentations, and film screenings. It will also present a lavishly illustrated publication with essays and interviews.

Sonic Acts and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam proudly present:
An Afternoon With: Douglas Kahn
9 October 2011, 15:00 hrs, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Curated by Sonic Acts:
Kontraste Festival 2011– Imaginary Landscapes
14-16 October 2011, Krems (Austria)

The 2011 edition of the Kontraste festival is curated by Sonic Acts. The first revamped edition will take place from 14-16 October in Krems in Austria, an hour’s drive from Vienna. This edition of the festival explores a wide range of imaginary landscapes created by composers, filmmakers, musicians and artists.

Imaginary Landscapes is obviously a reference to the groundbreaking compositions by John Cage. His Imaginary Landscape #4 is probably the first composition to exclusively use pre-recorded and electronic sounds. But Imaginary Landscapes refers to any landscape conjured up for our senses by artistic or technological means. It refers to abstract two- and three dimensional spaces, to immersive environments made from pure light and spatialized sound. Imaginary Landscapes refers to the potential of sound and light to make us imagine what is not there, make it feel real, or make us dream.

You can immerse yourself in cinematic experiences, a mesmerising fog environment, spatial laser works, and electronic music by pioneers and new heroes of the genre. These compositions – some specially commissioned – are performed on the massive loudspeaker orchestra of the Acousmonium.

The revamped festival also hosts an extensive film programme, soundwalks and site-specific works. A publication and a symposium with keynotes, panel discussions and presentations will contextualise the festival theme.

Expect cutting-edge sonic and visual experiments by Eliane Radigue, Douglas Kahn, KTL, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Edwin van der Heide, Chrstina Kubisch, Jan-Peter Sonntag, Yutaka Makino, HC Gilje, Gert-Jan Prins, Greg Pope, Kees Tazelaar, Hilary Jeffery and many others.

Sonic Acts and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam proudly present:
An Afternoon With: Douglas Kahn
9 October 2011, 15:00 hrs, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

The Arts of Sound in a Natural History of Media
Douglas Kahn will describe how his new media theory, based historically in 19th Century telecommunications, can be used to understand the ways in which artists and composers in the 1960s and since have used the sounds of physical forces at the scale of the earth as their natural raw material.

Communications technologies have never been about communications; they have also been used to scientifically and aesthetically sense natural energetic systems, the wind and radio, at the scale of the earth. Ancient music was heard in telegraph lines as they became unwitting Aeolian harps playing what Henry David Thoreau called Sphere Music. The Aelectrosonic, new electrical sounds and music of nature, was first heard by Thomas Watson when the first telephone line acted as an antenna. Here are the acoustical roots of artists and composers who, beginning in the 1960s, conceived of physical forces at the scale of the earth as raw material. Artists and musicians increasingly work this way, now that climate change means that what we used to call Nature begins at the global level.

Sonic Acts suggests:
The Night Of The Unexpected
8, 9 & 10 September 2011, Utrecht, Amsterdam & Eindhoven

Expect the Unexpected during The Night of the Unexpected. This year, for the first time, The Night of the Unexpected can be experienced outside the capital. On September 8, will have its kick-off in Tivoli, Utrecht. The Friday night (September 9) will take place in Paradiso, Amsterdam, and on Saturday 10 September The Night will move on to the Muziekcentrum in Eindhoven.
The Night of the Unexpected is an auditive roller coaster, where boundary-defying musicians from the world of composed and improvised, but also electronic and experimental music, flout all conventions. Like Flying Lotus-protégé Thundercat together with pianist (and labelmate) Austin Peralta, and risting star, Dutch composer Michel van der Aa, whose work will be played by Erik Bosgraaf and Sarah Nicolls.
Line-Up
Thundercat feat. Austin Peralta / Kid Koala / Hauschka / Lean Left (Terrie Ex, Andy Moor, Ken Vandermark & Paal Nilssen-Love) / Erik Bosgraaf / Sarah Nicolls / Slagwerk Den Haag / Lunapark
and works by: Michel van der Aa / Seung-Ah Oh / Philip Glass / Louis Andriessen / Arnold Marinissen