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Sonic Acts

On 5 November 2021, Sonic Acts marked a new season of Night Air events at OT301. Through talks, performances and films, Shock Waves considered the materiality of sound as a powerful means of resistance and control. The programme included talks by María Edurne Zuazu,  Elena Cohen, and Yann Leguay, films by Aura Satz, an installation by Paula Montecinos and Pedro Matias, along with a performance by White Rose and DJ set by Noise Diva.


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# About Shock Waves

Sonic weapons like the Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), ‘roof knocking’, or ‘music torture’ are frequently used as part of the arsenal of state violence. **Elena Cohen**’s work as an attorney and professor specialised in repressive police practices was presented to Night Air through a series of case studies of how these can be deployed in protest, detention, and warfare, causing a range of harm from disorientation and psychological distress to permanent internal damage. As discussed by **María Edurne Zuazu** in her book _Loud but Non-lethal: Acoustic Stagings and State-Sponsored Violence_, such instruments rely on high-intensity and focused sound to suppress individuals by impairing their auditory systems. 

In his performative lecture **Yann Leguay** spoke to the dematerialisation of sound and the evolving effects of interfaces, featuring an electrical arc produced by a plasma speaker so powerful that it emanates magnetic disturbance. The two films by **Aura Satz**: _Between the Bullet and the Hole_ (2015) and _Preemptive Listening Part 1: The Fork in the Road_ (2018)  approached sonic obedience and disobedience through the trope of the siren and investigate ballistics as a field of study in relation to the role of women in early computing.

If the energy of sound can be harnessed to cause harm and stifle dissent, it also constitutes a creative field for confrontation and resistance. **Paula Montecinos** and **Pedro Matias**’ installation _N/pantla _ presented a corporeal debordering of fractured sound – addressing how intimately tied gendered and racialised capitalism are to our communal sense of self-preservation. To finish off the evening performances and DJ sets by local artists **whiterose** and **Noise Diva** invited us to embody dissonance and noisemaking on the dancefloor.


Shock waves

# NIGHT AIR

Night Air is a series of events that aims to make pollution visible by bringing forth the various side-effects of modernity: from colonial exploitation of people and resources to perpetual inequalities brought about by the destruction of the environment and common land – in other words, destructive capitalist practices that shape both our environment and human-nonhuman relations. 

**Night air is a myth with its origins in miasma theory (from the Greek for ‘pollution’). The theory held that smelly air from decaying organic matter caused illness. The smell would intensify and worsen by night, so night air became synonymous with poisonous and noxious vapours that could even cause pandemics such as cholera or plague. Only with developments in medicine and various scientific endeavours around the London cholera epidemic in the mid-1800s, did germs replace the ‘unhealthy fog’ as the culprit for diseases. And now, even though the idea has been abandoned, night air still echoes in words such as malaria (‘bad air’ in Italian), which actually connects air-borne poison with flying pests such as the disease-carrying mosquitoes. 


