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Released this track officially with my ep HEADY in December.

I made the video myself with some 3D footage by two friends who are cgi artists. The video reflects on the monotony and absurdity of our realities caught up in the fake news, propaganda and nihilism which inspires depression and suicide. The lyrics ask, “Is there a form of secondary orality Mister Walter Ong, to put out cigarette butts on your tongue?” This makes a point about how cultural politics can equally be understood in terms of language as alternative forms of communication, such as a subcultural competition for masculinity where men burn cigarettes on their tongue to assertain their strength and “hardcore”. This is just one example of course.

The video alludes to Coca-Cola advertising, and the hidden messages behind the media. It reminds me of the 80s film “They Live” where the protagonist, John Nada finds a box of sunglasses and when he puts them on, he is looking at ideology from the outiside. It hurta, its brutal and direct. Also interestingly, he needs the glasses to abstract himself from the ideology meaning he is way too deep in it to see it for what it is. He is in the lie. He swallowed it without noticing, until he finds the glasses which show him the other side of things. These were some lines of thought in the making of this video.

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Gustav Metzger performance 1965

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Major Project Proposal

I am interested in the potential of sound as a subversive ground for ideas and action to manifest into reality. From Attali’s book on Noise, I’ve taken strong inspiration to create a body of work in which the use of sound can be pioneered as a point of resistance within the universal language of music. 

In popular music we find that the very essence of subversion originally found in obscene genres such as punk and hip hop and prior to them in jazz, inevitably became commodified and turned into fashions, rendering these subcultural platforms meaningless and devoid of the initial power they held within the context in which they were produced. Once these new canons were established defining them as music genres, after the initial controversy they generated, we find that through their commodification and globalised consumption they become something else entirely. When something is classifiable and tagged it loses its potential to disrupt and shift power relations, it enters public consciousness as an image, an idea usually portrayed by the media lacking the depth from which these resulted. It is then dated, like a ticking bomb, entered chronologically into history as an event that will inevitably pass. At the same time, their attributes become in a way open source for new generations to reinterpret and for nostalgics to try to emulate. Nostalgics or purists of music genres can fall easily into anachronism, which in my view perpetuates the commodification of forms of cultural expression. Hybridity can instead challenge those preconceived ideas of what something is and unite people through a broad palates. The internet has made this possible by having created through social media a global appeal through different styles of music. MIA was probably the first global artist to achieve this successfully through the use of internet, and still today her music cannot clearly be classified as belonging to a singular genre. I believe that through an anachronistic hybridity, taking from past musical movements and merging them with modern narratives, can create new grounds for understanding of human evolution. Through the perspective of cultural politics we can learn how our current social and environmental issues today have come to be, and just how they can be turned or challenged through art and reason. As Hegel suggested, progress is never linear and there is evidence today that regression to former extremes is being pushed against the narratives of equality and human rights which threaten the status quo from many different angles. 

Hardcore punk originated in the 70s as music genre and subculture in the USA. Bad Brains were one of the most well known bands of this genre formed in 1977. It is faster and more aggressive than other forms of Punk rock, and emerged as as a reaction against the hippie movement of the time. This led to a cross over with hip-hops most aggressive lyrical themes in the 80s, with artists like Public Enemy, Run DMC, and later NWA who championed the Hardcore Rap genre with stories of gang life, confrontation, oppression, racism and dissent. Some of the sounds used in American Hardcore in the 70s were influenced by European Industrial music, with bands such as Throbbing Gristle, Coil and Cabaret Voltaire. Industrial music was very provocative at the time. In the 80s, EBM began in Belgium, laying the grounds for Hardcore techno, with a dance music inspired by industrial and new wave, minimal and cold, violent, underground, but engaged and sincere. 

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Artist Bio

Astrid Gnosis Colombian-Spanish born, artist based in London. Self-made, she is her own producer and executer, a multidisciplinary artist with a growing body of work in music, performance, video and sound arts.

Gnosis had a Catholic upbringing, with militant discipline in an antagonistic environment, she turned to creativity for self expression. From childhood she was classically trained in Flamenco and Ballet, and began to write poetry at the early age of 13.     Gnosis‘ creates dystopian, hard and intricate sonic landscapes, with tints of genres ranging from martial industrial, techno, to experimental and ethnic-electronica, coldwave, gabber and rap. Born a non-conformist, from a lineage of Colombian Liberation army Generals, her music is incendiary, a testament to the ongoing catastrophes of her generation. Broadly her  practice revolves around themes of violence and urgency. "Im fascinated by ritualistic channelisations of violence through simulation, the kind found in religion, dance, folklore and pagan ceremonies and other social practices that involve a shared language of some sort."

Her evocative poetry reflects on her philosophical influences, with a relentless stage presence and message, she is a magnetic performer.

“Through my work the main interest is in creating semantic networks in the form of images, video and poetry, relating to cognitive dissonance in modern western society. These maps or works navigate through its symptomatic disorders that are deeply rooted in social, mental and structural collapse. It is in the moments on the brink of collapse where lucidity occurs and new paths are paved, better witnessed in hindsight as steps towards change. The type of change is not my focus but rather expressing the urge for it, and the pleasure of witnessing its decay as a sense of empowerment, rather than feeding into a culture of distraction. I simply glorify discomfort as a state of being.”

Gnosis’ describes her shows as Destructivist art rallies. Her performances conduct cinematic visual installations and staged interactions that both involve and envelope the audience in what she says is “a form of ritual murder”.

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Marc Acardipane, produced 1989 released 1990

This is the track that is claimed to have begun HARDCORE 

Marc Acardipane and Thorsten Lambart founded the label PCP records in 89. 

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Thorsten Lambart - founder of PCP records

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Lecture Notes - Urgency to trouble time, shake its core. Produce collective imaginaries that undo pervasive conceptions of temporality that take progress as inevitable.

MAD - military doctrine of mutually assured destruction

Is there a possibility of working responsibly in the field of physics in the aftermath of the Atomic Bomb?

Is the field so utterly tainted with destruction and violence that there is no possibility of SUBVERSIVE PARTICIPATION?

As feminist science studies scholars have convincingly argued, ethical issues are not limited to the applications of scientific theories, but VALUES are made together with FACTS inside the operations of what is called Pure Science, then are the practices of theorizing and experimenting caught up in war making capitalist projects of expansion and extraction, growth and development such that they INEVITABLY lead to the production of NEW FORMS OF VIOLENCE

How are theories of space time and matter marked by gender, race, sexuality, nationalism and colonialism.

Can we find traces of this violence even in its most abstract instantiations?

If this is so, are there nonetheless openings that exist within physics that might trouble its hegemony, its authority, its unapologetic epistemological imperialism that claims to cover all of space time and matter.

is there a way to use physics own insights to undermine its entanglement with colonising practices?

Indeed it is possible that inside such practices we might find RADICAL POLITICAL IMAGINARIES that are resources for survival rather than destruction.

A gentle realism has been my attempt to begin to approach some of these questions.

Political Deconstructive Project of opening up the seeming totality called Physics with a capital P. 

IN ORDER TO NURTURE THE CRACKS and bring forth its radical possibilities.

This deconstructive dynamic, the inevitable generations of its undoings from within, is an insight that can be found within Physics, and not just in Derridian Deconstruction or indeed QUANTUM INSIGHT

----------- She clarifies ; The point is not to glorify physics, to leave it off the hook so as to leave it outside of politics, but on the contrary, to hold it accountable while at the same time being attuned to the radical possibilites of its deconstructive openings to the fact that it might indeed new material imaginaries, other possibilities, other worlds that are not merely to come, but exist in the thickness of the NOW.

A diffractive reading through the insights from a host of different theories that concern themselves with questions of social justice, including feminist, queer, trans critical race theory, post colonial, de-colonial studies, marxist theories of Structuralism and deconstruction, through a gentle realism to form her own personal understanding of Quantum Theory. Rather than the Scientists Truth, capital T.

“I am become Death, the destroyer of Worlds” J. Robert Oppenheimer 

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The beginning of Hardcore. Internal wars reflect our environments faults and disfunctionality. Aiming towards a connection with our true self and our planet in a holistic way, as Kendell Geers suggested, starts from knowing where we are coming from, and who we are. Mastering the self, through a process of Kantian Sublimation, where we succeed from our most neglecting and self defeating attitudes which corrupt us and hence corrupt our environment. We can use that energy to invest in projects that forward humanities existance even if it is at a small level of one to one. As an artist the aim to inspire these reflexions and draw not just from fantasy and ideals or utopia, but rather from our realities and how might we learn from them to better our experience of them.

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The beginning of Hardcore - I think the intro to this song is genious.

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Os protegemos de vosotros mismos - Colectivo Democracia

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Sin Estado / without state by Colectivo Democracia

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Communication / Surveillance

In an era like ours , where communication is so accessible, facts have been blurred with opinions and in the huge cacophony of information that we find in the internet, it has become extremely difficult to process and distinguish friend from enemy, and extremely easy to conceal the truth and render it unimportant as in the cases of whistleblowers like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange. I think it is absurd to want to remain outside and completely abstracted from the online realities we have created. Sure they were introduced by huge corporations, but it was our use of them that established them as what they are today. The trick is in learning to navigate through the internet today knowing (to some extent) the risks and compromises it demands from us and also engage with it in a smart way, using the tools available to reinforce our work in real life.

The internet has changed hands, it has been privatised and monitored exhaustively, and is no longer the place it used to be at the turn of the millennium. Maybe through a joint effort we can one day democratise the internet.

Beirut based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan talks about surveillance. We shouldn’t aim for privacy, rather more surveillance and access to more aggressive surveillance of the processes we want.

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Dionysian / Apollonian thoughts

I wonder, if there is more potential through the Dionysian experience of music, for new ideas and social theories to become established, for messages to sit with the public, even as commodified as music has become, there is still a strength in underground music scenes, where people are creating communities, with strong ties with each other bound by commonality and respect. Different people in London today create spaces where a universal set of rules applies and everyone under the same roof is expected to act from. Excluded otherwise. I find interesting this new politicisation of private spaces and events, no longer determined by dress-code or other superficial things, but rather by the behaviour one expects and desires for oneself and others. If minorities like the trans community have found asylum in club culture historically, and are now being more and more represented in the media and entering public consciousness, is there not a reason to think that in the playground of music and the Dionysian festival we find ground breaking potential of subversion against the status quo?

I think the Apollonian arts have become to heavily institutionalised and dependant of private funding bodies. Music has still remained free from these ties, even though not entirely, it is possible nowadays for anyone with access to the internet to access, share and even create music. I think art in the Apollonian sense, the fine arts, have become stagnated within the same frameworks they attempt to subvert. Art must be alive.

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Lawrence Abu Hamdan - Earwitness Theatre @Chisenhale Gallery

My thoughts on this show are varied. While I understand the conceptual choice in the selection of items laid out in the installation, as a foley room based on the description of sounds heard by prisoners held at the Syrian prison of Saydnaya, I didnt quite relate it to the ear witness theatre, where I really missed the sound scape that these objects would have recreated. I found out through the gallerist that indeed the objects were used as part of a performance. However the intensity of the dark room would have been a powerful tool to immerse the visitor in the secretive and highly unspoken of world inside Saydnaya.

GALLERY WEBSITE TEXT ON THE SHOW

Chisenhale Gallery presents a new co-commission by Beirut-based artist and ‘private ear’, Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Earwitness Theatre develops Abu Hamdan’s enquiry into the political effects of listening, presenting a new commission that explores the hallucinatory world of the earwitness. Abu Hamdan’s exhibition is commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery in partnership with: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and it will be presented at the partner venues throughout 2019.

Abu Hamdan’s work questions the ways in which rights are being heard and the way voices can become politically audible. In 2016 Abu Hamdan was asked to create dedicated earwitness interviews for Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London’s investigation into the Syrian regime prison of Saydnaya. It is estimated that as many as 13,000 people have been executed in Saydnaya since 2011. Inaccessible to independent observers and monitors, the violations taking place at the prison are only recorded through the memory of those few who are released. The capacity for detainees to see anything in Saydnaya is highly restricted as they are mostly kept in darkness, blindfolded or made to cover their eyes. As a result, prisoners develop an acute sensitivity to sound.

During the interviews with Saydnaya survivors Abu Hamdan used BBC and Warner Brothers Sound Effects Libraries, as well as encouraging the mouthing-out of sounds and the use of test-tones, to gain insight into the actions taking place inside the prison. Unsatisfied by the imprecision of the sound effects used for feature film and television, Abu Hamdan has since amassed his own sound effects library, specific to the investigation of earwitness testimony.

For his exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery Abu Hamdan presents this expanded library of objects for the first time. Earwitness Inventory (2018) is comprised of 95 custom designed and sourced objects all derived from legal cases in which sonic evidence is contested and acoustic memories need to be retrieved. Tuning into earwitnesses descriptions, such as a building collapsing sounding “like popcorn” or a gunshot sounding “like somebody dropping a rack of trays,” Abu Hamdan’s new installation reflects on how the experience and memory of acoustic violence is connected to the production of sound effects.

Alongside this installation, which includes pinecones, cannelloni pasta, unwound video tape, a selection of shoes and a series of customised door instruments, is a new animated text work that further reveals Abu Hamdan’s acoustic investigation into Saydnaya, as well as earwitness testimonies from legal cases across the world. Central to the exhibition, and surrounded by this collection of objects is a contained listening room hosting the audio work Saydnaya (the missing 19db) (2017). In this work Abu Hamdan oscillates between listening to the testimony of former detainees and listening to their reenacted whispers as a form of sonic evidence in itself.

Both installations presented as part of Abu Hamdan’s new exhibition explore what can emerge from audio-focused investigations, examining the role of artifice, illusion and creative labour in the construction of evidence and the specific truth that artists, and artwork, can produce. Earwitness Theatre comments on the processes of reconstruction, addressing the complexity of memory and language, and the urgency of human rights and advocacy. What will emerge through this process is a body of work that testifies to the threshold of an experience – where sounds are remembered as images, where objects have unexpected echoes, and where silence becomes an entire language.

As part of this new body of work, Abu Hamdan will also present his expanded video installation Walled Unwalled (2018) and new performance After SFX (2018), at Tate Modern, London from 1 October to 7 October 2018 (performance on 4 October). The sounds, voices and texts that comprise the performance are derived from objects included in Earwitness Inventory, giving audiences the opportunity to see and hear the project in its entirety across the two galleries.

As part of the commissioning process, a series of discursive events have been programmed in collaboration with Abu Hamdan and run throughout his exhibition, and contribute to the organisation’s Engagement Programme. Abu Hamdan’s exhibition continues Chisenhale Gallery’s programme for 2018, which includes major new commissions by artists Lydia Ourahmane, Paul Maheke and Banu Cennetoğlu. Through his work, Abu Hamdan raises questions concerning how history is constructed in order to examine the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge, themes that recur throughout Chisenhale Gallery’s programme for 2018.

Biography:

Lawrence Abu Hamdan (b. 1985, Amman, Jordan) lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. Recent solo exhibitions include: Hammer Projects: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Maureen Paley, London (2017); Earshot, Portikus, Frankfurt (2016); Taqiyya, Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2015); Tape Echo, part of Positions, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2014); Aural Contract: The Freedom of Speech Itself, The Showroom, London (2012). Selected group exhibitions include Sharjah Biennial 13, Sharjah; Strange Attractor, Ballroom Marfa, Texas (all 2017); 9th Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool; (all 2016); British Art Show 8, Hayward Gallery, London and touring; Surround Audience, New Museum Triennial, New York (both 2015). Abu Hamdan was the recipient of the Abraaj Group Prize and the Baloise Art Prize (both 2018).

Earwitness Theatre is commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery in partnership with: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam;Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and it will be presented at the partner venues throughout 2019.

Lead supporters of Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery’s are: Shane Akeroyd; and The London Community Foundation and Cockayne – Grants for the Arts.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery is also supported by: The Henry Moore Foundation; and Muriel and Freddy Salem, Cranford Collection. With additional support from Mark Hix and HIX Restaurants and the Lawrence Abu Hamdan Supporters Circle. With thanks to Maureen Paley, London.

Saydnaya (the missing 19db) (2017) was commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation.

Chisenhale Gallery’s Commissions Programme 2017–19 is supported by the LUMA Foundation.

Chisenhale Gallery’s Curatorial Trainee Programme 2016–18 is supported by Sirine and Ahmad Abu Ghazaleh.

Chisenhale Gallery’s Engagement Programme 2018 is supported by the Engagement Programme Supporters Circle.

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This is America - Childish Gambino

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Hoax Purveyors and Whistleblowers @GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE - Lecture notes 2

Cable Gate - Wikileaks

The whistleblower becomes the spectacle

Artist + Journalist Crofton Black 

I asked him if he had considered Sound as a medium to divulge and promulgate messages to broader audiences, which art and journalism seem to fall short of when trying to engage.  - He mentioned he was actually working on a sound project with his creative partner but that he didn’t wish to get into any more detail.

Q. I would like to go back to what this lady said earlier, about Andrei Molodkins exhibition called Fallout Pattern. She commented how it did not have the impact that it was “worth”.

I wonder - What was the desired impact?

What do you think the faults of journalism are in causing consequential impacts on peoples consciousness to better inform their actions and contribute to change their realities? 9/11 was the clearest most recent moment when this happened in the West. Is this a fault of journalism per say or is it bad journalism that through private manipulation and hidden interests has lost the power and respect it held, desensitising the audiences around the world to almost anything.

-Andrei’s Fallout Pattern, who was the audience? Is it not a fault of the arts institution and discourse that it has become inaccessible for anyone outside the intellectual circle?

I find that music can be easily processed + distilled within society just as information is being devoured and consumed every day. At the same speed we can go from heavy to light. Activists on social media can go it seems from human rights issues to what skin care product they use. All in the same place for an audience who craves to be entertained and have its attention grabbed simultaneously by something entertaining and something with depth. 

Childish Gambino for example impacted a huge number of people with his video for This is America. Addressing the subject of racial violence in America in a brutally honest yet highly coded theatrical presentation. Is 300million views a more impactful work of art? Doesn’t political art need to bridge this gap between its audience with money and its audience which needs growth and a Hegelian sublimation?

Andrei Molodkin : Fallout Pattern - Public Sculpture proposal for the Red Square

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Hoax Purveyors and Whistleblowers - Lecture notes 1

Invited speaker : - Behrang Tajdin, Journalist, Reporter, BBC Persian

Moderator :

- Dr Sylwia Serafinowicz

Behrand Tajdin notes how as a reporter, people from Iran that talked with him and his team, risk their safety because it is a crime as it is illegal to give information to them not because the BBC reporters are against the Iranian government and the Iranian state, as in fact he mentioned there are Iranian tv channels that are openly against the Islamic republic that are not persecuted the way they are, but rather because people trust them as they adhere to the BBC editorial guidelines. So he mentioned the options available to them to report what is happening in Iran, which limits them to using archive material which doesn't reflect the reality of what people on their streets everyday, they can use some graphics or what the state broadcasts with their own logos. But at the end of the day he says, when it comes to big stories people send them videos and audio. In the past year since the beginning 2018 the value of Iranian currency has plummeted massively, lost 75% of its value against the Dollar, meaning people spend 4 times as much on basic goods and services while wages have remained the same. As a result of this there was a nappy crisis, they became so expensive that stores stopped selling them. So people with children at home, would send him and his team videos of stores where there were no nappies in stores and couldn't find them anywhere, and in asking them what they could do about this, they found a way in which people could actually help them tell the story. 

The question asked by Dr Sylwia Serafinowicz is so then how do you protect the people who provide you with this evidence agains the Iranian censorship machine.

Tajdin said it is a learning process from both sides. A collaboration between them as the media outlet and the people that want them to tell their stories, as they aren’t told by the state broadcaster monopoly of radio and tv. He says, they have learnt to discern what content is true or fabricated. He recalls it began in the 2009 elections when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was reelected, while the political opposition denied this result and many people took to the streets in protest against his reelection, where many people were killed which was he says, unprecedented in Iran. Since then he claims they have become great at identifying fabricated videos and people (presumably their informers) have become very good at asserting the origin of the footage they send. Basically mentions people learn how to use them as media outlets and they learn how to get peoples help to do their job.

The dynamics between Friend and Enemy come up in relation to Andrei Molodkins work. Dr Sylwia Serafinowicz asks is he has been involved in the negative propaganda or campaign against Iran that is being run in the United States, how has it affected his work and how does he respond to that.

Tajdin is talks about the sanctions imposed against Iran on the 5th of November, which were meant to be lifted once the nuclear deal was signed but unilaterally the USA has reimposed them without an obvious reason. Tajdin did a piece explaining the new sanctions and people took against him on social media accusing him of being an agent or mouth piece of the Trump administration, and others of the Islamic Republic. He says that to create this report he did an extensive research through around 50,000 numbers that were released by the Iranian central bank over 20 years, to realise what had the impact of sanctions been on ordinary people. The result of this study was that Iranian people had become 17% poorer, but in the previous 10 years of the sanctions they had become 43% richer. His story was that sanctions, hurt people. That is a fact, he says. But in this day and age everyone has an opinion, and that is in his view the biggest problem for journalists right now. When you say the fact that for example us a species have contributed to the climate change, it becomes an opinion.

This reminds me of Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s lecture on the politics of listening, and how he mentions that in Totalitarian states there is no freedom of speech and people are forced to listen and learn the same story. Where as in western democratic states there is freedom of speech and no one listens to one another, giving for example the UN recording he took.