RND: Resonating Amidst the Dissonance

Aleksei Borisionok, Morten Poulsen, Eleanor Griffiths

00:00

Free entry

Module 3 is hosted by Sarah-Indriyati Hardjowirogo (Universität Oldenburg).

Nuclear Death Terror: On Radiation and Anarcho-punk

Aleksei Borisionok (freelance curator)

This research investigates the intersections of nuclear catastrophe, post-socialist temporality, and countercultural resistance in Belarus and Ukraine. It focuses on how notions of »nuclear death terror« – emerging from local punk and anarchist scenes – express both the trauma of nuclearity and the defiance of technopolitical control. Drawing on anarcho-punk sound, zines, and cultural practices, Borisionok explores how punk culture after Chornobyl articulated ecological anxiety, anti-nuclear critique, and anti-imperialist resistance. The project traces connections between radiation, social unrest, and youth subcultures that transformed collective fear into political energy. 

Borisionok is interested in how prefigurative forms of politics and culture developed aesthetic and temporal strategies to confront catastrophe – from dystopian imagery and sonic aggression to rituals of solidarity and care. By situating punk as a form of historical witnessing and form of prefiguration, the research reveals how alternative networks in Belarus and Ukraine reimagined the future amid ecological collapse, state violence, and ongoing war. Mediating between post-socialist immediacy and deep time of radiation, Borisionok's interest lies in the specific forms of sound, which was prefiguring social unrest in Belarus' social uprising of 2020.

Aleksei Borisionok is a curator, writer, and organiser who currently lives and works in Vienna. He writes about art and politics for various magazines, catalogues, and online platforms such as e-flux Journal, L’Internationale Online, Partisan, Springerin, and Paletten, among many others. He is currently a fellow at the Vera List Center in New York, and, together with Katalin Erdődi, he was co-curating the Matter of Art Biennale in Prague (2024).

Hygge Acoustics: (Dis)comfortable Politics

Morten Poulsen (independent artist/researcher)

Hygge is a social construct that is deeply embedded in Danish culture, with origins in the development of the Danish middle class. It is elusive and ubiquitous, yet it informs sociability by creating ideals for social behaviour, shaping orientations and ways of participation, belonging, and exclusion. Though hygge commonly describes a cozy mood evoked by comfort, it relies on norms in which thorny subjects – critical statements or dissidence that risk creating discomfort – are avoided or rejected.

Throughout his research, Morten Poulsen, sound artist, researcher and native Dane, explores the history of hygge as a social phenomena and its effects on public speech and listening, in order to answer questions about the space for dissident expression in Denmark, particularly in the light of the protests against the Danish governments' complicity in the genocide in Gaza. Morten analyses this topic through the lens of social acoustics (B. LaBelle), considering the framework of »the distribution of the sensible« (J. Ranciere), and questions of orientation and alignment (S. Ahmed), in order to better understand how hygge functions as a form of social control enforced on voices of protest, leading to what Nina Dragicevic describes as auditory poverty. When expressing discontent is seen as causing a deep discomfort that »risks« agitating the status quo, how does socio-cultural constructs such as hygge influence the space for struggle over recognition and justice?

Sound artist and researcher Morten Poulsen explores socio-political structures, often focusing on gender, power relations, climate change, and the ways in which they intersect. His work has been shown across art institutions such as The Engine Room (London), SixtyEight Art Institute, and c4 projects in Copenhagen (DK). His artistic research has been presented at the PARSE Biennial for Artistic Research, Gothenburg (SE), Trans+ Virtual Center of Excellence, London (UK), and Seismograf (DK).

Posthumanism in Experimental Electronic Music is Dying: Here’s Why

Eleanor Griffiths (independent artist / practice-based researcher)
 
This talk examines the potential consequences of the overemphasis on posthumanist ideas in experimental electronic music and its ideological roots in tech-utopianism. Key figures in the experimental electronic music scene of the late 2010s to early 2020s have positioned their practice at the precipice of electronic music and technological advancement. In a post-COVID world and Europe grappling with the resurgence of War, the experimental electronic music’s positioning as the vanguard of musical creativity and technology seems out of touch, tired, and self-obsessed.

This talk argues that an overemphasis of posthuman ideas in the experimental electronic music scene has led to a focus on humaness through mimicry and dialectical systems, which avoids humanity's complexities by overemphasising compositional mediums through which music is made rather than the music’s potential emotional depth and connection. To quote Jung, »We need more understanding of human nature, because the only danger that exists is man himself and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man« (Jung, 1957). 

Key questions include: Why are we so afraid of ourselves? The shying away of humanity's complexities in music composition through a focus on mimicry, dialectic systems, and machines. And also: Why an era of posthuman technoromanticism has led to experimental electronic music’s obsession with mediums, which has abandoned audiences.

Eleanor Griffiths is a music artist, producer, and practice-based researcher creating electronic music under the alias LAMIA. A Music Master's (MMus) graduate of Goldsmiths University of London, where she held two scholarships, she also studied Music at Leeds Conservatoire (BA) and now studies Production at Catalyst Berlin (MA). Eleanor's practice applies Post-Jungian methods in Popular Music Production, while her written research explores Popular Music digital fandom and the deep web.

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