Memes, GIFs, and endless streams of TikTok videos. Our digital lives are often saturated with visual culture, but there is so much more that makes up our internet ecosystem. In 2022, around 650 million new tweets were posted on a daily basis and it’s estimated that each day 100 billion messages are sent via WhatsApp. Podcast listeners make up almost 465 million people around the world, and we haven’t even started to talk about music streaming services and online radio. During tonight’s event we’ll be joined by researchers, artists, designers, and makers who will take us through the world of non-visual internet culture. With our eight speakers we’ll explore alt-text as poetry, radio gardens, generative podcasts, and much more on Wednesday April 19 at Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam.
Lieven Heeremans has helped us put together a very special program as our guest curator for the evening. Lieven is a creative producer and editor specialised in audio, and the co-founder of the Podcastnetwerk.
Can’t join us in person in Amsterdam? Or just want to watch from the comfort of your own laptop? All of our events are hybrid so you can also buy a ticket to join The Hmm @ Tolhuistuin online via our livestream website.
Early internet bulletin board systems (or BBS’s) were online discussion systems that allowed users to post and read messages on various topics. They were typically accessed through dial-up modems and were the precursor to modern-day forums and social media platforms. Jason Scott is the founder of TEXTFILES.COM, a 25 year old library of BBS history. He’s also the software curator of the Internet Archive, one of our favourite places on the web. He’ll be joining us tonight to talk about TEXTFILES.COM, or, what happens when 50 years pass in ASCII. Link
Ceola Tunstall-Behrens
The first voice recognition machine was built, by Bell Labs, in the 1950s. Since then, the voice has had a significant place in technological developments. Ceola is a multidisciplinary artist who works with experimental music, sound, art and performance. Through her work, she’s exploring the power of the human voice and its multifaceted characteristics. Tonight she’ll be sharing her latest project: creating a voice clone of herself using AI voice cloning software as part of her longterm research on digital immortality.
Loma Doom
Femke Dekker (better known as Loma Doom) is a true radio veteran and beacon of twisted and mesmerizing sounds. Using radio and archives as her main media, her current focus is on various notions of listening and how listening is actually a call to action. Femke has a multi-faceted practice as a contemporary arts educator and is an artistic research fellow for the Amsterdam based Visual Methodologies Collective. She’ll be joining us tonight to talk about listening practices, radio in relation to digital technology, and the transformation of radio into a visual practice. Link
Mahmoud Hashemi
Every day, activity on the internet grows faster and more hectic. On average, the combined Wikipedia databases receive over 3 edits per second, 24 hours a day. But is it possible to find peace, calm, and even community in this fray? Mahmoud, a software developer with a passion for the wiki world, and his collaborator Stephen LaPorte seem to think so. Together they’ve created Listen to Wikipedia, a multimedia visualiser which translates recent Wikipedia edits from around the world into a display of visuals and sounds. Link and Link
Bianca Schrijver & Geert Vlieger
Ever wondered about the billions of streams that Drake has and the handful of plays your cousin’s band has? While Spotify might feel like one big music library, it’s a social media app with an algorithm, curators, and playlists—all of which have a huge impact on the songs you get served every day. Bianca is a fulltime journalist and podcaster and part time millennial and Geert is a podcast maker who loves merging his storytelling skills with over 10 years of music production experience. Tonight, they’ll be joining us to share how they tried to infiltrate the music streaming business. As it turns out, everything is for sale on the internet. Link
Laura A Dima
Touch is a sense that we don’t often associate with the internet and digital technologies. Laura is a multidisciplinary artist whose work manifests in multimedia installations that explore cultural norms around touch, intimacy, and privacy. She’ll be joining us tonight to share her work and research into haptic technologies, like “Future Affair,” an interactive installation that allows participants to give and receive affective touch remotely. Laura will also touch on the ethical issues of trust and consent within virtual or hybrid environments. Link
Katharina Smets
Katharina is an audio artist and researcher currently working on a doctorate in the arts of auditory imagination. In her work she models documentary materials into stories, both for live performances and for radio productions. Katharina will be joining us tonight to talk about her PhD research ‘Between me and you. On the attitude of the audio documentary maker.’ which examines the subjective gaze in contrast to feigned objectivity and centers the importance of the conversation between interviewer and interviewee, and between the work and its listeners.
Sandipan Nath
Sandipan’s work is characterized by transdisciplinary collaborations at the interface of artistic and scientific inquiries — focussing on questions of agency, community, language and listening. He’ll be joining us tonight to talk about his project DataTone, which focuses on staging encounters with algorithms, as a means to bring forward the creative agency of machine learning algorithms outside the realm of data extraction, colonialism, capital accumulation, automation, control and bias. Link
