News:
Between Improvisation and Infrastructure:
Mapping Social Dissonance
Presentation and Workshop
8-10 October
School of Conceptual and Contextual Practice,
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Visual Arts, Copenhagen
While the world collapses, they say: be yourself!
Confusion and noise are today the order of things.
What can we do when everything is falling apart?
We can improvise. However, we always improvise within infrastructures that privilege some lives over others. These infrastructures are growing ever more repressive, racialised, entangled with war, and in some cases complicit in genocide. At the same time, technology and social media propel us into a constant state of emergency while eroding our capacity for attention. Against this, improvisation and listening offer ways of attending to one another and to the forces that shape us.
But who is the “we,” and what values do we hold? The we here is yet to be configured. In the meantime, there is relentless pressure to succeed in a society that does not care about our well-being. We are forced to conform to a liberal idea of subjectivity, with its notion of individual freedom—a notion that is itself currently disintegrating through algorithms and increasing fascism. It is impossible to talk about equality when noise, chaos, and confusion are instrumentalised for profit from our social interactions. This leaves us as subjective vagabonds—phantom subjects compelled to project a competent self while inside corrosive alienation eats us away, yet we are forced to manage it individually. Social Dissonance is the concrete manifestation of the impossibility of being a subject under capitalism.
There is, however, the possibility of collectivising all this social noise as an open-source form of negativity that we can confront together. For Marina Vishmidt, infrastructure critique is not about “epistemic regulation and intellectual hygiene: it is a kind of unfreezing of the fast-fixed, one that can also happen within collective processes of debate, education, organising, and struggle.” Rather than understanding improvisation as self-expression on a tabula rasa, we can think of improvisation as occurring within infrastructures that are historical and mutable. In this way, improvisation might be connected to broader struggles.
During this workshop, through the use of scores, diagrams, and exercises in listening and improvisation, we will attempt precisely that: to make sense of infrastructures that reproduce structural alienation, to examine how they affect us, and to explore how we might act both within and against them.
Situierte Dissonanz mit Mattin, Langenhagen Kunstverein
Deutschland steht vor vielen Herausforderungen, darunter der Aufstieg der extremen Rechten und Diskriminierung (Rassismus, Antisemitismus, Islamfeindlichkeit ...), Cancelling und Zensur von Protesten gegen den Gaza-Krieg, Inflation und eine wirtschaftliche Rezession. Der Motor Europas ist kaputt - oder zumindest nicht in bester Verfassung – und die geopolitische Lage sehr fragil.
Wie wirkt sich das auf uns aus?
Es liegt Spannung in der Luft und die Unternehmung Situierte Dissonanz zielt darauf ab, sie mit bestimmten Mitteln an einem bestimmten Ort zu fassen zu kriegen: Langenhagen.
Soziale Dissonanz bezieht sich auf die Diskrepanz zwischen liberalen Vorstellungen von Freiheit, unserem Selbstverständnis und einer Realität, die diese Werte auflöst.
Die Langzeitunternehmung Situierte Dissonanz umfasst die Übersetzung des Buches Social Dissonance mit Hilfe von KI und das Veranstalten einer Lesegruppe, in der wir gemeinsam besprechen wollen, in welchem Verhältnis die von uns diskutierten Themen in Beziehung zu Langenhagen, Deutschland, 2025 stehen. Zudem wird es performative Interpretationen einer Partitur mit Handlungsanweisungen und Interventionen im öffentlichen Raum geben. Im September diesen Jahres werden wir das Ganze mit dem Festival of Social Noise abschließen. Das während der Unternehmung entstandene Material wird später in eine Publikation einfließen.
Dieses Projekt ist inspiriert von einer Arbeit der Künstlerin Karolin Meunier, der experimentellen Übersetzung eines Buches der italienischen Feministin und Autorin Carla Lonzi.
Social Dissonance wurde ursprünglich auf Englisch von Urbanomic MIT Press veröffentlich.
Out Now:
Disonancia social, Mattin con prólogo de Ray Brassier y epílogo de Cécile Malaspina, traducido por Claudio Iglesias, Dobra Robota (Buenos Aires) y Tsonami Ediciones (Valparaiso)
Social Dissonance book with Preface by Ray Brassier Urbanomic (Falmouth)
PDF
Reviews
Review by Mario Aguiriano, Radical Philosophy
Social Dissonance, interview with Mattin - Pierre d'Alancaisez
Soziale Dissonanz – Wir sind nicht, was wir glauben zu sein, Heimo Lattner mit Mattin, Kultur Mitte (Berlin)
Entretien avec le philosophe et artiste Mattin
Par réalisé par Cécile Malaspina
« Noise » Leçons d’un empirisme sonore déchaîné, Rue Decartes (Paris)
Interview With the Philosopher and Artist Mattin: It Is Easier to Imagine the End of the World Than an
Alternative to the Liberal Individual by Cécile Malaspina, Future Humanities Wiley
Special Edition on Social Dissonance Future Humanities Wiley
Upcoming:
Abolishing Capitalist Totality book edited by Anthony Iles and Mattin, Archive Books (Berlin)
Yann Charaoui, Anthony Guerra & Mattin "London: 2 December 2000" CD Krim Kram (Cork)
Keith Rowe & Mattin 2CDs Krim Kram (Cork)
Al Karpenter LP "Greatest Heads" Night School (Glasgow) Hegoa (London) Reviews
Shows, Presentations and Workshops:
GEIGER Festival, Ny musik och ljudkonst i Göteborg
FREDAG 24 OKTOBER
19.30 - Kazuko Ihara (JP)
20.30 - GAGEEGO (SE)
21.30 - Kris Kuldepp (EE)
LÖRDAG 25 OKTOBER
19.30 - Pierre Bastien/Louise Lauraine (FR)
20.30 - Mattin (EUS)
21.30 - Nigel Ayers (UK)
What Is Infrastructural Critique?
A conference in celebration of the life and work of Marina Vishmidt (1976-2024)
Weds 29 - Fri 31 October, 2025
‘the term infrastructural critique articulates this question of scale and immanence, with infrastructural, rather than institutional, only to the extent that the institution is not affirmed in the critique of it, and infrastructure has a materiality that can’t be confined to the institution’ – Marina Vishmidt
With talks and presentations by:
Marwa Arsanios
Hannah Black
Maria Bussmann
Helmut Draxler
Rose-Anne Gush
Danny Hayward
Angela Melitopoulos + Kerstin Schroedinger
Taylor Le Melle
Mattin
Andreas Petrossiants
Natascha Sadr Haghighian
Robert Schlicht + Romana Schmarlisch
Kerstin Stakemeier
Alberto Toscano
*
Hosted by KKP, Art and Communication Practices
Auditorium, Angewandte
EG / Ground Floor
Vorderer Zollamststrasse 7, Wien 1030
2026
8th April Al Karpenter, Cafe Oto, London
11th April Al Karpenter, Counterflows Festival, Glasgow
Ongoing:
Validation, Research Process, Index, Stockholm
Noise Research Union (with Cecile Malaspina, Sonia de Jager, Martina Raponi, Miguel Prado and Inigo Wilkins)
NRU in conversation with Manus Saklas part 1 (30.04.2023), Stegi Radio
NRU in conversation with Manus Saklas part 2 (1.2.2024), Stegi Radio
Social Discipline podcast
Miguel Prado & Mattin thinking aloud with invited guests about the current events regarding CODIV-19.
They let the unconscious improvise in this absolutely unexpected present, trying to render actual a no longer distant future
Bio:
Mattin is an artist, musician and theorist working conceptually with noise and improvisation. Through his practice, writing and pedagogy, he explores performative forms of estrangement as a way to deal with structural alienation. Mattin has exhibited and toured worldwide. He has performed in festivals such as Performa (NYC), Shanghai Biennial, No Fun (NYC), Club Transmediale (Berlin), Arika (Glasgow), Sonic Protest (Paris) and
lectured and taught in institutions such as Dutch Art Institute, Cal Arts, Bard College, Paris VIII, Princeton University and Goldsmiths College.
In 2017, he completed a Ph.D. at the University of the Basque Country under the supervision of the philosopher Ray Brassier. Along with Anthony Iles he edited the book Noise & Capitalism (Kritika/Arteleku 2009).
In 2012, CAC Brétigny and Tuamaturgia published Unconsitituted Praxis, a book collecting his writing, interviews, and performance reviews. Anthony Iles and Mattin are currently in the final stages of editing the volume Abolishing Capitalist Totality:
What is To Be Done Under Real Subsumption? (Archive Books). Urbanomic published his book Social Dissonance in 2022. Mattin is part of the bands Billy Bao, Regler and Al Karpenter and has over 100 releases in different labels worldwide.
Since 2020, he co-hosts the podcast Social Discipline with Miguel Prado. Prado and Mattin are also part of Noise Research Union (NRU) with Cécile Malaspine, Sonia de Jager, Martina Raponi and Inigo Wilkins.
In 2017, Mattin took part in documenta14 (Athens and Kassel). Mattin is an associate professor at the Tromsø Academy of Arts at UiT–The Arctic University of Norway.
Material
Regler
Anti-Copyright
@abjectsubject
mattin at mattin period org