Urbanomic and Flatlines present: Sonic Faction: Audio Essay as Medium and Method

Urbanomic and Flatlines present: Sonic Faction: Audio Essay as Medium and Method

On the occasion of the publication by Urbanomic of the book Sonic Faction edited by Maya B. Kronic, Justin Barton and Steve Goodman, this event provides a platform for immersive collective listening. A programme of diverse ‘audio essays’ produced by the editors, the first three releases on Hyperdub’s sublabel Flatlines, invites the audience to experience the ways in which sound and voice can produce new sensory terrains and provoke speculative thought.

Kode9’s Astro-Darien (2022) is a sonic fiction about simulation, presenting an alternative history of the Scottish Space Programme, haunted by the ghosts of the British Empire. Justin Barton and Mark Fisher’s On Vanishing Land (2006) is a dreamlike account of a coastal walk that expands into questions of modernity, capitalism, fiction, and the micropolitics of escape. Robin Mackay’s By the North Sea (2021) is a meditation on time, disappearance and loss as heard through the fictions of Lovecraft, Ccru, and the spectre of Dunwich, the city that vanished beneath the waves. Kodwo Eshun will join the editors to discuss the potential of the audio essay as a medium and method that intensifies listening and unsettles the boundaries between existing forms: documentary, music, ambient sound, field recording, radio play, essay-film and beyond.

Presented by Institute of Contemporary Arts.

This is an 18+ event