Infrasonica is a digital platform of non-Western cultures. We record, analyze and debate the eeriness of sound and its auras, linked to the world with the audible, the hidden and the sensitive. Infrasonic waves operate at a frequency that is undetectable by human ears even though they are often generated by massive ecological phenomena, such as the movement of tectonic plates or the deep currents of the ocean. Infrasonica aims to be a catalyst for those vibrations.
The platform includes archives of experimental sound and visual artists, as well as theoretical musings on contemporary critical thought. By relying on a borderless network of collaborators, Infrasonica blends essays, conversations and speculative works that encourage critical curatorial and research projects.
- Voicing Abstraction / Wave #7
July 2022 - 6
Voicing Abstraction / Wave #7:
Pneuma is conceived as the original creative act by Classical Greek philosophy; the vitality of breathing transformed into expression. Breathing as sound at the service of linguistic public interaction. Voicing as a form of being in the world, that when merged into the collectiveness of society, resonates as a powerful political tool.
Liberal politics are, to an extent, organized through the regime of identity and citizenship in which voicing acts as representation; as the foundation of representative democracy. The articulation of a sonic utterance as one's self-identification becomes the shtick of citizenship. What cannot be voiced is ostracized as politically null.
Certainly, not every ontological enunciation is to be expressed by voicing oneself's identification (whatever this might be). One example of this is the abstraction of voice found in Inuit throat singing, where voice serves as a rhythmic bias that works more as an invocation. The expressiveness of sounds through the pneuma has a multiplicity of channels, the voicing of identity is only one of them, hegemonized by liberal politics.
By Voicing Abstraction we take aim at the inherent contradiction of placing these two words together. Learning from the legacy of indigenous art, abstraction is much more than the refusal of representation, as opposed to Western modernity; it's the articulation of meaning at the service of a specific community, used as a strategy to safeguard non-colonial memory. Abstraction, in this case, is not unintelligible but enigmatically literal. With this Current, we are examining practices of voicing that take distance from the politics of representation, articulating spaces where indigenous silences, the poetics of sound and the ritualistic dimension of language open the space for a different kind of the self, one not mediated by the state or by the taxonomy of liberal politics.
Voicing Abstraction’s first entry, Wave #7, presents a diverse collection of artists, practitioners, and thinkers. Their work takes the form of hybrid essays, sound pieces, jam sessions, images and intimate conversations.
Wave Track
St Celfer developed an innovative and sophisticated instrument – a “gambiarra,” in Brasilian Portuguese – named Step4D™. Since the isolation of the pandemic, St Celfer has released hundreds of songs on dozens of albums which have been played on radio stations around the world. He has twice been named New & Notable by bandcamp.com, 2021 & 2022. St Celfer of Korean and American origin currently lives between São Paulo and Seattle, the latter living off/on since 1990. A fan of Seattle grunge, was, once upon a time, in the 00's New York scene performing, among other places, at CBGB's.