Speculative Dust Circuits
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The development for this workshop begins in two places – firstly, the project of transmission+interference (Strang and Van Uffelen) that openly explores the creative making and hacking processes in developing noise machines for installation and performance. Over time, this project has begun exploring the rich power and potentiality hidden within the object of dust as a creative sonic force. This has emerged through exploring materialist processes, and often under the influence of speculative making practices.
The second point of development for this workshop is the journal paper by John Richards titled Speculative Sound Circuits (2018). In this paper, Richards neatly mixes the materialist and object focused sonic practices of Cage and Tudor with the world emerging from speculative design. This particular approach is where the workshop will develop from – through tinkering and t(h)inkering with materials and objects instead of offering a defined set of strict guides for making (in which everyone makes exactly the same thing).
Speculating over the material powers of dust to act as a creative force will require exploring new ways of knowing that, in this situation, can only be achieved through the making process, through the objects, and through the intra-actions of all workshop components (human and non-human). In following Donna Haraway’s writing on making-with the workshop is encouraged to explore new ways of knowing that can only be achieved through an ontological flattening of the workshop, thus enabling the powers of materials and objects to be further realized across the workshop. The workshop aims to raise a material consciousness and generate a knowing through making – also known as t(h)inkering.
As well as developing thoughts around First Nations’ ways of knowing and how this is potentially entangled in Haraway’s thoughts on making-with or sympoiesis, discourse around the shifting temporalities encountered through the objects and materials at play in the workshop will develop as the deep-time of encountering dust will become expressed across the workshop. How dust is created for the workshop and how all actants in the workshop will eventually become dust over varying degrees of time enables the ontological flattening of all in the workshop, explicitly fostering the hidden connections between human and non-human actants across mixed temporalities.
The 1-day workshop will begin with a short introduction to the tools and machines emerging from previous workshops before setting out the scope of the day where the group will actively speculate with dust and electronic noise components. Further reading around the topic will also be shared but will be circulated amongst all those who sign up to the workshop in advance to ensure most time is focused on making. A short reader will be developed to introduce these texts drawing on developments in new materialist ontologies from, for example, Barad, Bennett, Bryant, Coole, Haraway, Harman, and Morton.
