SAVVYZΛΛR | Transpositioning On Air
UNTRAINING THE EAR LISTENING STATIONS: Isolated future # 4
WITH bani haykal
07.02.2021 16:00-18:00
ON AIR On SAVVYZΛΛR in Berlin 88.4 FM & Potsdam 90.7 FM @reboot.fm as well as streamed online on our website, and on Facebook
This Sunday, we return to a piece aired from Singapore during our UNTRAINING THE EAR LISTENING STATION 2020:
Isolated Future #4 by bani haykal reflects on the kinds of relationships we have with our machines, from smartphones to laptops. In response to our placeless/placefulness invitation, bani created a piece of speculative futures and fiction, a piece through sound traveling with imaginary communities.
LISTENING STATIONS refers to a mode, a type of listening with our body as a station, irrespective of adjutant tools, a body which receives and processes sound. Rather placed than searching, rather stationed, we presume to have more attention to the unknown elements that every place has. We ask ourselves how we can grasp these elements, and is what we are now able to listen to rather anew than new to our ears.
BANI HAYKAL (in Singapore) will respond with a speculative fiction piece through sound travelling with imaginary communities. As part of an ongoing series of field reports on various communities around Singapore, isolated future #4 looks into a community of machinic dukuns (a Malay term for shamans) residing in the abandoned estate of Tengah. Machinic dukuns, often misidentified as hackers, have offered services to augment machine behaviour, intelligence and processes at the interest of protecting various communities at risk. this field report, published with permission, looks into the various strategies, spells and communities they’ve worked with as a means of surviving the troubles.
As an artist, composer and musician, bani considers music (making / processes) as material and his projects investigate modes of interfacing and interaction with feedback / feedforward mechanisms. Manifestations of his research culminate into works of various forms encompassing installation, poetry and performance. In his capacity as a collaborator and a soloist, bani has participated in festivals including MeCA Festival (Japan), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Media/Art Kitchen (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Japan), Liquid Architecture and Singapore International Festival of Arts (Singapore) among others.
“My current obsession is looking at language as a starting point of imagining the future. It started when I was thinking about how it’s interesting that in the Malay language, there isn’t a specific word for ‘future’ but there’s a specific word for the day after tomorrow. It got me thinking about time in relation to cultures, and how different cultures have different perceptions of time. I saw this as an opportunity to think and write about language as an entry point to talk about temporality and how different communities/cultures imagine time, past, present and future. What would one of many futures look like based on cultural definitions of time?” This was bani’s response to the question “how important is the power of language in what you do?” asked by Singapore Writers Festival in an interview.