Link to concert: mediathek.hfbk.net/lecture2go-portlet/player/iframe

The concert invites the audience to a multi-layered sonic conversation with the intra-active image-organism E.I. the Blob. Interested in communication that goes beyond instrumental language, subjectivity, and reason, the event sets out to explore laughter beyond human laughter, and searches for ways to open up the presumed closeness and predictability of digital machines and systems toward more unknown protocols that allow for spontaneous movement and change. Inspired by theories of quantum physics, the transformational powers of matter in vibration will here be enacted and explored with voice as well as digital and analogue sounds.

Annika Larsson is an artist and is professor of time-based media at the HFBK Hamburg. Her work examines the entangled relationship between power, knowledge, embodiment, affect, and visuality within our digital and physical worlds. It looks into conventions and affects that structure the way we perceive, experience, and understand the relationship between images, matter, bodies, systems, and the social world. Engaged with the potential of (human and nonhuman) queer performativity, her work is interested in gestures, affects, rituals, and actions, in patterns of behavior that obscure or challenge power structures. Her works have been widely shown internationally at institutions including Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Fundacion la Caixa, Barcelona; Le Magasin, Grenoble; Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg; ICA-Institute of Contemporary Art, London; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; S.M.A.K., Ghent; and Musac, Lyon. She has participated in biennials such as the 49th Venice Biennial, the 8th Istanbul Biennial, and the 6th Shanghai Biennial, among others. Larsson lives and works in Berlin. Since 2018 she has led the artistic research project “Non-knowledge, Laughter and the Moving Image,” funded by the Swedish Research Council and done in collaboration with the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and the HFBK Hamburg.

E.I. The Blob is a noise-making intra-active “image-organism” sensitive to sound and touch, created to explore new ways of thinking, being, and acting with the moving image. As an “intra-active” vibrant body, it plays a central role in the artistic research project “Non-knowledge, Laughter and the Moving Image” led by Annika Larsson, where it participates in the attempts to open up for human to non-human social relations, where situated forms of response-ability exist. E.I. could stand for Earthificial Intelligence, or simply a mispronunciation or confusion of the acronyms A.I. and E.T. Exhibitions and concerts include: Alien Laughter, Stockholm Academic Forum, Stockholm; KAN.N, Q ŪN, CANON (…), KunstWerke, Berlin; Love, Body and Work: Artistic Research in Uncertain Time, Konstakadademin Stockholm; The Sleep Over Experiment Index Foundation, Stockholm; Music for Future Images, Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Encores, Teatro Goldoni, Venice; Animalesque: Art Across Species and Beings, Bildmuseet Umeå; and BALTIC, Gateshead, England.

Satch Hoyt is a spiritualist, a believer in ritual and retention. A visual artist and a musician, his diverse and multifaceted body of work—whether sculpture, sound installation, painting, musical performance, or musical recording—is united in its investigation of the “Eternal Afro-Sonic Signifier” and its movement across and amid the cultures, peoples, places, and times of the African Diaspora. Those four evocative words (a term coined by Hoyt) refer to the “mnemonic network of sound” that was enslaved Africans’ “sole companion during the forced migration of the Middle Passage.” It was, and is, a hard-won somatic tool kit for remembering where you come from and who you are—and maybe, where you’re going—against all the many odds. Of Jamaican-British descent, Hoyt was born in London and currently lives in Berlin