Venue:
ifk arkaden
Reichsratsstraße 17 – ground floor
1010 Wien
In collaboration with beta now.
All discourse events are free entry!
Thu, 4. September
16:00-18:00–”Neptune Frost”. Screening
SAUL WILLIAMS & ANISIA UZEYMAN: “Neptune Frost” (2021)
18:00-19:30—”Debris & Memory”. Listening session
w/ MATTI GAJEK, moderated by SAMO ZEICHEN
Matti Gajek invites us to join him to listen to music from his archive, spanning three decades of experimental music produced in the GDR. Experimental music was mostly frowned upon by the state during the GDR era, equipment was very hard to come by. A lot of imagination was needed to be able to make music freely. After the reunification, this legacy was not given much attention, a lot of the music forgotten. Together with Samo Zeichen, we will listen and discuss archives, memory, youth culture, nostalgia, ghosts, and emotions.
Friday, 5. September
13:00-14:30–“Infinity Minus Infinity”. Screening
THE OTOLITH GROUP: “Infinity Minus Infinity” (2019)
BLACK QUANTUM FUTURISM: “Write No History” (2021)
BLACK QUANTUM FUTURISM: “Time Travel Machine” (2017)
14:30-15:30–”Recursive Futures… Precarious Crossings: “heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs”*”. Conversation
JESSICA EDWARDS in conversation w/ MIKKEL RØRBO
In this conversation, Jessica Edwards’ presentation on the temporal vacuoles of fugitivity, explored through the historical context of the Transatlantic Middle Passage and the contemporary Middle Passage of the illegalised precarious crossings, forms the starting point. Through conversation with researcher Mikkel Rørbo, the two will consider the sounding of bodies, the sharing of embodied knowledges, and the entanglements of racial capitalism, histories and futurities while reflecting on the manifold themes presented through the films of The Otolith Group and Black Quantum Futurism.
15:30-17:00–“Resonant Futures. Haunted Archives and Technologies of Resistance”. Panel Discussion
w/ HUDA TAKRITI, FRIDA ROBLES, NELLY Y PINKRAH moderated by TAYLA MYREE
This panel examines the shifting relationships between memory, archives, and technologies in contexts shaped by colonial histories and displacement. Resonant Futures considers how memory persists in bodies, communities, digital traces, and artistic practice. The haunted archive appears in fragments, returns, and interruptions, where past and present resurface and contend with one another through story, image, sound, and silence.
The discussion centers on artistic, scholarly, academic and imaginative interventions that unsettle and reconfigure collective memory. Huda Takriti traces digital practices of remembrance around France’s colonial legacy in Algeria, showing how nostalgia and desire circulate through social media, songs, and fragments of return. Frida Robles activates ancestral thought as a forceful critique, drawing forward histories of deicide, genocide, and the annihilation of worlds. Her bands of fabric inscribe these memories into the present, confronting the endurance of colonial fantasies of progress. Nelly Y. Pinkrah reflects on artificial intelligence and data infrastructures, interrogating how they determine what enters the archive and what remains erased, while asking how technology might support more caring modes of relation to the past.
The talk invites participants to inhabit the uncertainties and dissonances that mark memory. What continues to live on? Where does silence protect, and where does it constrain? How might futures emerge from critical reckonings with what continues to haunt the present?
17:00-18:00–”Planeten Zeiten Denken”. Gespräch (dt)
ARMEN AVANESSIAN im Gespräch mit SHILLA STRELKA
Im Rahmen seiner kurzen Keynote wird Armen Avanessian skizzieren, warum wir überhaupt erst lernen müssen, was es heißt, auf einem Planeten zu leben, wenn dieser nicht mehr als ein lebloses Stück Materie betrachtet wird, sondern eine lebendige Rhythmusmaschine der Evolution.
Im Anschluß soll auch diskutiert werden, wie es sich in einem zunehmend mit Informationen (und Kontrolle!) aus der Zukunft geprägten Regime der Hyperantizipation lebt, in der sich biographische und planetarische Zeitrhythmen in einer neuen Biografischen Tiefenzeit verschränken.
Saturday, 6. September
15:00-16:30–”Endcore: The Chronopolitics of Doomscrolling”. Panel Discussion
w/ MARTYNA MARCINIAK, SARA BEZOVŠEK, MARTINA MENEGON, moderated by: SOPHIE PUBLIG
Endcore: The Chronopolitics of Doomscrolling brings together artists Sara Bezovšek, Martyna Marciniak, and Martina Menegon to explore how digital cultures reshape our sense of time. From doomscrolling, microtrends and algorithmic acceleration to glitch and the machinic rhythms of AI, the discussion traces how digital temporalities emerge, collapse, and can be resisted. We will ask how artistic practices not only reflect but also intervene in these shifting chronopolitics, and what strategies of deceleration and re-entanglement with time might be possible.
16:30-18:00–”Deep Feedback Loops”. Keynote
w/ ELIJAH & open discussion, moderated by মm.
For this year’s edition of Unsafe+Sounds Festival, London-based writer, DJ and creator of the instagram sensation, ‘Yellow Squares,’ Elijah will deliver a keynote on the role of time as a creative force in current digital ecosystems of cultural work. “Deep Time Loops” will bring Elijah’s current work in conversation with practices of quick work, output and feedback loops with the audience so as to capture discourses of the present time. Foregrounded by possibilities of the internet as a medium for digital cultures and public discourse, Elijah’s keynote brings his worlds of music, DIY-practices and subcultures together.