Reading Sideways Press: Unfiltered Radio, Tactics for Publishing Critical Inquiries and Transmitting Solidarities
Sunday, July 28, 2024
Exhibition during all ICAS 13 ConFest dates
Location: Balai Pemuda Barat
Exhibition Details: Reading Sideways Press sees independent publishing as a means to nurture new thinking in contemporary art and culture. Our exhibition aims to show publishing as a tactic to articulate new voices, reclaim autonomy within a restrictive academic environment, and develop trans-local friendship and camaraderie. We showcase various art and cultural projects which convey critical thought and messages in ways that some academic structures cannot. We use it as a point of productive reflection to reimagine publishing differently, and by extension to exercise our utopian thinking. We form an alternative domain to take back a sense of identity, justice, and the rights to theorise, which have been marginalised by the gatekeeping mechanism of the art and academic world through writing, reading, making research, drawing, listening, workshopping, organising a collective lapak (pop-up shop), book bending, circuit bending and jamming. We collaborate with various groups of thinkers, activists, artists, community organisers, within the local Surabaya ecosystem. Our exhibition space will serve as a kind of unfiltered radio, or a night market, hosting diverse storytellers, voices and worlds. As we are sharing stories and listening to each other, our exhibition seeks to make these fleeting moments last for a long time.
SUNDAY, JULY 28, 2024 13:00 - 15:00
Guided tour: Radio No Filters
A guided tour session to explain ‘unfiltered radio’ as the working method and logic which drives the exhibition. Nuraini Juliastuti and Fiky Daulay will lead the session. During the session, Juliastuti and Daulay will invite the public to observe various objects and happenings inside the exhibition space.
TUESDAY, JULY 30, 2024 15:00-17:00
Workshop: Book Bending
The workshop is dedicated to those who want to explore the complex dimensions of access and politics of knowledge. The workshop will be divided into two sessions. In the first session, using the morality discourse around copyright and piracy as a starting point, the participants will be invited to engage in a conversation around piracy, illegality, and illicit but licit. The discussion will be directed to reflect on the meanings of the wealth of knowledge (or the illusion of wealth), rare, difficult reading materials. In the second session, the participants will be invited to think about how to access a certain knowledge material differently. The participants are asked to think about what materials (essays, short stories, lyrics of certain songs, etc) that they want to learn. Some parts of the second session will be allocated to think and read about the impossibilities and possibilities of writing and giving spaces for other voices. The second session focuses on the employment of various tactile strategies to obtain knowledge: copying, translating, rewriting, scanning. The session will conclude with manually drawing out specific cover for the books that the participants want and wish to write.
Let’s become radio mechanics: On listening and circuit bending workshop
Workshop circuit bending intends to explore other ways of listening, accessing, and distributing the sound. During the workshop, the participants will learn how to critically bend the common means of listening, access, and distribution in a technological manner. Circuit bending implies a figurative meaning as an attempt to trace other sounds based on the existing sonic qualities on radio electronic architecture. It can be, indeed, imagined as an endeavour to chart other sonic paths under the rationale of hacking, experimenting, or outsmarting a fixed order. Moreover, ‘circuit bending’ to be grounded as a practice of examining, observing, and studying the structure of knowledge.
The workshop will be divided into two main sessions. First, participants will be invited to dismantle radio devices and take some time to examine electronics traces through certain technical approaches. These approaches do not require previous electronics knowledge. The workshop will be equipped with various approaches in creating sounds. In the final session, participants are expected to share their circuit bending experience followed by a jamming session: demonstrating their bending constructions with other participants.
We would like to kindly invite you to participate in our guided tour, unfiltered Radio. The tour is imagined as a strategy in listening signs, navigation, and forces to a certain point through radio capture without filter or unlimited playback of signal reception. The unfiltered radio has been designed to scan various signals that might be ‘captured’ or ‘fleeted’ in certain locations. It animates other possibilities in accessibilities of knowledge.
The guided tour will be divided into two sessions. First, the participants will be grouped and take roles of guides, operators and also harvesters. The tour will chart a sonic map that has been designated, in the surrounding area of exhibition venues. In the final session, the participants will be returning to the departure point and share their sonic experience, concluded through a jamming session as a collaborative event in recirculating their listening experience by reciting keywords while performing the radio instruments in the exhibition area.
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