Soapbox Issue 1.2 Launch: Off the Grid 7 November, 20:00-22:30, Perdu, Amsterdam
Grids are omnipresent and likewise invisible. They govern our landscapes and cityscapes, our paintings and grocery lists, our maps and our borders, both walled and imaginary. In light of their paradoxical potentialities and limits, as that which supports and restrains us, we asked: is going off grid desirable, or even possible? Celebrating the launch of…
Call for Board Members
Call for Board Members *** Please note that we are no longer looking for new board members or participants for the academic year 2019-2020. If spots do open up we will post about it here and on social media. *** Would you like to be part of a student-run journal that functions as a platform…
DIS HARMONY
“Dis Harmony is a fictional character, the contra alter ego of Harmony, a sex doll driven by an app that allows the user to create a virtual girlfriend sold on realbotix.com. Harmony is the cruel promise of a girlfriend who will never cheat on you. Well, we found ways to hack the software. Dis Harmony fucks Harmony but…
Anxious Altars Material renderings of mental space
How do our material work spaces embody or inspire our mental space? How are these spaces entangled with the emotional labour of writing? While writing my thesis project, which focuses on rethinking affective engagements with anxiety, I have been inspired by feminist accounts of emotion. Theorists such as Kathleen Woodward and Ann Cvetkovich write against…
Towards an Acoustemology of Time Acquiring and aligning an aural knowledge of flows of time
In this addition to the “Practices of Musicking” series, author Edda Starck explores the creation and acquisition of aural knowledge through listening-oriented practices. How do we come to both hear and think of the passing of time, and how can listening situate us to the rhythms that punctuate and proliferate our daily lives in a way in which we can hear how we and the objects that comprise our aural soundscapes pass through time?
Get involved with Soapbox! Informal get together May 7
Interested in joining or contributing to Soapbox? We invite you to an informal get together at Vox-Pop from 4.30pm on Tuesday 7th May, where you can get to know more about us and learn how to get involved! Soapbox is a journal for cultural analysis run by and providing a platform for students, PhDs and…
Singing in Silence The affordances of the (im)perceptible
As part of our series ‘Practices of Musicking’, Zeno Siemens attunes to the non-sonic forms of ‘singing’ exhibited by deaf performers in Christine Sun Kim’s ‘Face Opera II’. These embodied, visual and spatial acts of signing and facial expressions offer a musical experience accessible only through a non-aural, embodied practice of listening.
Meyhanescapes Visualising embodied musical experience in the meyhane tavern
For the first piece in series ‘Practices of Musicking’, Suzi Asa attempts to understand her musical experience in Turkish taverns (‘meyhanes’) through illustrations that she terms ‘meyhanescapes’. Exploring the extra-sonic, embodied aspects of this ‘musicking’ experience, her visualisations allow us to rethink the nature of music and musical perception as based in practice – and not merely as aural ‘practices of listening’.
Listening to Race An interdisciplinary workshop on coloniality, race and sound
Ahead of the publication of our first issue, themed ‘Practices of Listening’, Zeno Siemens reports from this workshop exploring coloniality and race in sound, archives, listening technologies and practices.
Low-Resolutions Alternative self-improvements for 2019
To welcome in the new year, Justine Gensse and Anouk Hoogendoorn offer an alternative to the self-improvement narratives of New Year’s resolutions. Collected from students of ‘Gender, Bodies and the Posthuman’ at the University of Amsterdam, these ‘Low-resolutions’ form part of the exhibition W_show, which features work in progress from the University’s Master of Artistic Research.