Date: 20 September 2024
Time: 17:00-19:00
Place: Institute for Futures Studies, 4th floor, Holländargatan 13, 111 36 Stockholm
Listening Session And Drinks
The Institute for Futures Studies hosts the premiere of a new 15-minute sound work.
Drawing on materials from the ongoing project Ghost Platform, Dirty details of the clean startup chime collages field recordings and other encounters with sites of logistical importance situated outside of popular awareness: ports, data centres, nuclear power plants, e-commerce warehouses, urban delivery hubs, and transoceanic power and internet cable interconnects. We could say that these sites and the labor struggles unfolding across them as they become increasingly operative in our everyday lives are “invisibilized,” but for the evening we engage them as “unheard.” How does the sunny soundtrack backing the smooth data vizualization meet the churned soil, sweat, and mechanic klang of place? When workers with firsthand familiarity attempt to collectively envision more just futures, what can be overhead, whispered, echoed back behind the dominant story being sold to us? What is the resonance of this haunted longing when the image is blocked off? With a screen shutting down or locked in black mode, what shakes through?
The listening session will be followed by drinks and a curated logistics and infrastructure-themed playlist. The event will also share information about other artistic research projects currently hosted by the Institute for Futures Studies.
GHOST PLATFORM: Generating the "Complex Image" of Data, Labour, and Logistics is a three-year artistic research project led by artist Benjamin Gerdes and funded by the Swedish Research Council (2023-2025), hosted at the Institute for Futures Studies. It convenes logistics workers and artistic researchers to co-design a software tool—a ghost platform—combining sound, image, text and virtual elements with discussion of these obscured perspectives.
September Sessions is a a contemporary art festival in Stockholm. A four-day programme spread over various art organizations in the city as well as public spaces in Stockholm. It hosts exhibitions, performances, concerts, film screenings, IASPIS Open Studios, readings, and social gatherings.
