Events

Screening

12 April 2024 Friday 5:30-8pm. Free Entry

An Ear to River ~ recovering landscape 2023

A film in collaboration with Ross Adams. Running time: 33 minutes.

This film arises from the fertile bed of Channelsea river, and the mud banks of Channelsea island. After the bend there’s a dead end, an ecotonal community alive with self-seeded inhabitants, effluent overflows, waste waters, mud, industrial detritus, people in search of rest, tidal flow. On the island birch, alder, bramble and buddleia make slow steady progress demolishing the former chemical works buildings, young holly and holm oak forecasting the evergreen future of the land. Light, wind and rain remember their way in.

The sounds have been gathered by Blanc Sceol through their on-going site specific work there. A somatic score creates a space for participation, the field recordings and poems were recorded and written during and after encounters at different times of day and night, hydrophones witness tidal flows, a voice recycles the word ‘waste’ on a tape loop, a waterphone filled with river water and a song slide around one another, and self-created instrument ‘Orbit’ is played inside Abbey Mills pumping station. Ross Adams’ wide-eyed visual reflections circumnavigate the island as a solitary, exploratory flowing eye. This witness reaches around, above, inside and through its contrasting elements – the detritus of the abandoned landscape in conversation with dense new growth.

The film came out of an audio-visual performance collaboration created for the EnCounters x Music and Other Living Creatures series, curated by Helen Frosi and Cafe OTO Projects.

Also on display will be a Tide cloth – calico dyed with river sediment which was created in collaboration with the Channelsea river as part of the Spree~Channelsea Radio Group project 2023, as well as 2 x text scores written for Channelsea Island.

Listening Circle

Session One : 13 April Saturday 4:30pm £10

Session Two : 14 April Sunday 4:30pm £10

£10 | 8 places only each session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for ticketing

Duration: 75 minutes approximately

Access to the Channelsea river is closed throughout April, in preparation for the final connections to the Tideway tunnel due to be made later this year. As a result of this period of works, the Channelsea will once again be subjected to regular pollution events from the Abbey Mills overflow pipes. Join us to listen in live to the soundscapes of the river via an open microphone situated on the banks, tuning in as a way to be with the contemporary and historical pollution this waterbody has been expected to dilute. The circle will give us space to reflect on current and local ecological concerns through an embodied connection to our own inner waters. 

The live stream is part of the live soundmap project operated by Locus Sonus.

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.

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.