Past Events – Page 2 – Project DIVFUSE

Sightlines and light-maps : Setlist 4 zine launch

Exhibition :

6 September 2024 Friday 5pm – 7pm

7 & 8 September Saturday & Sunday 2:30pm – 4pm

Free Entry

Performances :

Set One : 6 September Friday 7pm | Benedict Taylor (viola) and Cath Roberts (baritone saxophone)

Set Two : 7 September Saturday 4:30pm | Barbie Mukoda (solo flutes)

Set Three : 7 September Saturday 6pm | Caroline Kraabel (alto saxophone) and John Edwards (double bass) [FULL]

Set Four : 8 September Sunday 4:30pm | Sue Lynch (solo saxophone)

Set Five : 8 September Sunday 6pm | Kate Carr (electronics) and Cath Roberts (electronics)

Tickets £7 – or £12 for two sets | 8 places available for each set | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets | There are still tickets available for all sessions except Set Three.

Exhibition and live improvised music to celebrate the launch of Setlist zine vol. 4. Setlist is a series of A7 riso-printed mini-zines compiled by Cath Roberts (Ink-Paper-Sound Press), where artists are invited to contribute a tiny provocation/agitation/starting point to be used in improvised performance. The theme for Setlist #1 was micro-texts, Setlist #2 was all about images, Setlist #3 questions and Setlist #4 (miniature) maps.

This exhibition will focus on the two image-based zines, volumes 2 and 4, with work by Sam Andreae, Old Bort, Angela Guyton, Bell Lungs, Kim Macari, Khabat Abas, Sophie Cooper, Hannah McCann, Livia Garcia, Tullis Rennie and Benedict Taylor. To date only seen as tiny pages of an A7 booklet, artists’ zine contributions will be blown up to comparatively huge sizes and projected onto the space. Responding to the visuals with improvised live sets will be members of improvising large ensemble ONe_Orchestra NEw and Setlist artists.

Medial Dark Ages : Laura Netz

Sound Exhibition:

23 August 2024 Friday 5:30-8pm

24 August Saturday 2:30-6:30pm

25 August Sunday 2:30-6:30pm

41 minutes. Free Entry

Live Sound Performance:

Session One : 24 August Saturday 5pm. £7 [Cancelled due to illness of artist. Tickets bought will be refunded.]

Session Two : 24 August Saturday 6:30pm. £7 [Cancelled]

£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.

Live Sound Performance:

‘Medial Dark Ages is a piece that uses field recordings, DIY electromagnetic detectors, and open-source electronic instruments. I have worked with bats, crickets, and sheep recordings in this composition. I have been experimenting with Bat5 Digital Bat Detector for the bats, which amplifies and filters the bat’s signals. The composition adheres to a postmaterialist perspective on technology, such as in James Bridle – New Dark Ages – and intends to fit music technology in the context of critical thinking and media archaeology theory.’

DIVFUSE / INNOVATE 2024 : Open Call

***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.

Submission Deadline : 14th June 2024 Friday

Inertia Instruments : David Sappa

Sound Installation Exhibition :

9 August 2024 Friday 5pm – 7pm

10 August Saturday 2:30pm – 6:30pm

11 August Sunday 2:30pm – 4pm & 5pm – 6:30pm. There is a performance from 4pm to 5pm. See below for ticketing details.

Free Entry

Performance :

9 August Friday 7:30pm with Nouria Bah £7

10 August Saturday 6:30pm £7 (Places available)

Additional Session 11 August Sunday 4pm £7 (Places available)

£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.

Nick Land’s Meltdown AI-fication : Kosmas Giannoutakis [PAST]

Screening :

Session One : 26 July 2024 Friday 6:30pm

Session Two : 27 July Saturday 4pm

Session Three : 27 July Saturday 6pm

Session Four : 28 July Sunday 4pm

Session Five : 28 July Sunday 6pm

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.

Two-Day Residency – Vox Aeterna : Howlround [PAST)]

Interactive Tape Loop Installation :

11 & 12 May Saturday & Sunday 2:30-5:30pm

No booking required | Free Entry

Performance :

Session One : 11 May Saturday 6:30-7:30pm £10

Session Two : 12 May Sunday 6:30-7:30pm £10

£10 | 8 places each session | Session One Tickets & Session Two Tickets

The installation will consist of an ‘eternal choir’ created by a series of vocal recordings made on a single tape loop stretched across the project space and running continuously throughout the day (or at least until it finally disintegrates and a new one takes over). Visitors and participants will be invited to listen in then contribute their own voices, the only instruction being that they harmonise with whatever was on the loop before them. Removing the tape machine’s erase head from the equation means that theoretically it should be possible to build up multiple layers of interlocking voices that blend, morph and disintegrate together before your very ears. Although given that this is vintage technology, nothing is ever certain. What we can guarantee is that we’ll create sounds that nobody else has ever made before and we’ll create them together. Both days will culminate in an evening performance featuring all the tape loops that have survived.