The Second Sound

Going Out explores the relationship between walking, listening, and soundmaking in the arts – from the first soundwalks and itinerant performances in the 1960s to today’s manifold ambulatory projects. The book consists of an extensive essay by Elena Biserna followed by an anthology of 51 historical and contemporary contributions in the form of documentation, essays, interviews, manifestos, scores, narratives and reflections.

Essay by Elena Biserna.

Contributions by Max Neuhaus, Willem de Ridder, William Levy, Collective Actions Group, David Helbich, Janet Cardiff, Jacek Smolicki, Carolyn Chen, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, Hildegard Westerkamp, Albert Mayr, Tim Ingold, Akio Suzuki, katrinem, Beatrice Ferrara & Leandro Pisano, Catherine Clover, AM Kanngieser, Gascia Ouzounian & Sarah Lappin, Ultra-red, Vivian Caccuri, Stefan Szczelkun, LIGNA, Edyta Jarząb, Oupa Sibeko, Brian Hioe, Brandon LaBelle, Adrian Piper, Andra McCartney & Sandra Gabriele, Amanda Gutiérrez, Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Stephanie Springgay, Carmen Papalia, Christine Sun Kim, Charles Eppley, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Viv Corringham, BNA-BBOT, Ella Parry-Davies & Ann, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Gwenola Wagon & Stéphane Degoutin, Eleni Ikoniadou, Justin Bennett, Christina Kubisch & Christoph Cox, RYBN, Alisa Oleva, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Anna Raimondo, Libby Harward.

‘I am concerned with the power of sound! and what it can do to the body and the mind,’ wrote composer Pauline Oliveros. In the body, histories and politics come together with sound and listening, memory and feeling. Bodies of Sound offers a resonant exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening in over fifty contributions. In this book of echoes, a variety of forms – from essays to text scores to art, fiction and memoir – speak across gender, ways of knowing, witnessing, sounding and voicing, translation, displacement, violence and peace.

With contributions from: 

Sara Ahmed, Ximena Alarcón, Svetlana Alexievich, Ain Bailey & Frances Morgan, Anna Barham, Xenia Benivolski, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson & Kite, Elena Biserna, Karen Barad & Black Quantum Futurism, Anne Bourne, Daniela Cascella, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maria Chávez, Don Mee Choi, Carson Cole Arthur, Petero Kalulé & AM Kanngieser, Lindsay Cooper, Julia Eckhardt, Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, Ella Finer, Annie Goh, Louise Gray, Christina Hazboun, Johanna Hedva, Sarah Hennies, Tomoko Hojo, IONE, Lee Ingleton, Hannah Catherine Jones, Christine Sun Kim, Nat Lall, Cathy Lane, Jeanne Lee & Lona Foote, Marysia Lewandowska, Annea Lockwood & Jennifer Lucy Allan, Cannach MacBride, Elaine Mitchener & Hannah Kendall, Alison O'Daniel, Naomi Okabe, Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram, Gascia Ouzounian, Holly Pester, Roy Claire Potter, Anna Raimondo, Tara Rodgers, Aura Satz & Barbara London, Shortwave Collective, Sisters of the Order of Celestial Nephology, Sop, Syma Tariq, Marie Thompson, Trinh T. Minh-ha & Stoffel Debuysere, Salomé Voegelin

Hackers, scholars, artists and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology.

When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.

The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor and researcher Mindy Seu (who began the project during a fellowship at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Klein Center for the Internet & Society, later presenting it at the New Museum), it includes more than 1,000 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.

Contributors include: Skawennati, Charlotte Web, Melanie Hoff, Constanza Pina, Melissa Aguilar, Cornelia Sollfrank, Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Mary Maggic, Neema Githere, Helen Hester, Annie Goh, VNS Matrix, Klau Chinche / Klau Kinky and Irina Aristarkhova.

Chickens have a collective soul. Heaven is full of the skateboarders you kissed in middle school. If the algorithm is its own hell, Lauren Cook, author of the critically (and uncritically) acclaimed Sex Goblin, stands in front of it fully armored. I Love Shopping invites its readers to inhabit a world just like ours, reflected through a big, benevolent funhouse mirror.

First published in a limited edition, this is the first trade edition of the cult classic.

Queer Ancient Ways advocates a profound unlearning of colonial/modern categories as a pathway to the discovery of new forms and theories of queerness in the most ancient of sources. In this radically unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves.

An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, Xiang's work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that had been all-but-lost to modern thought, in the process critically revealing the operations of modern/colonial systems of gender/sexuality and knowledge-formation that have functioned, from the Conquista de America in the sixteenth century to the present, to keep these systems in obscurity.

At the heart of Xiang's argument is an account of the way the unfounded feminization of figures such as the Babylonian (co)creatrix Tiamat, and the Nahua creator-figures Tlaltecuhtli and Coatlicue, is complicit with their monstrification. This complicity tells us less about the mythologies themselves than about the dualistic system of gender and sexuality within which they have been studied, underpinned by a consistent tendency in modern/colonial thought to insist on unbridgeable categorical differences.

By contextualizing these deities in their respective mythological, linguistic, and cultural environments, through a unique combination of methodologies and critical traditions in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Nahuatl, Xiang departs from the over-reliance of much contemporary queer theory on European (post)modern thought. Much more than a queering of the non-Western and non-modern, Queer Ancient Ways thus constitutes a decolonial and transdisciplinary engagement with ancient cosmologies and ways of thought which are in the process themselves revealed as theoretical sources of and for the queer imagination.

Nico Vela Page’s Americón is a collection of poems in Spanglish that weaves a space for the queer, trans body to know the land, and itself, as extensions of each other. The land is the desert of Northern New Mexico, the forgotten Pan-American Highway, the space between our thighs, the quaking cordillera of Chile, the moans of elk, and the ripe fruit waiting to be picked. Through archive, attention, and erotic ecopoetics, Page’s debut collection of poems extends far across the page, the gender binary, language, and the Americas to find out who we are by asking where we are.

BEAUTY KIT – AN ECO-EROGENOUS ART PROJECT by Isabel Burr Raty with contributions by Kristin Rogghe, Elke Van Campenhout, Gosie Vervloessem, Pablo Diartinez and Tim Vets, is an experimental catalog summarizing Isabel Burr Raty’s research on conceptualizing and manufacturing eco-erogenous para-pharmaceutical products. It tells the story of the BKFF, a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their orgasmic juices to produce beauty bio-products, used for treatments in the BK Spa, critically discussed in the BK Focus Group and moving forward into becoming a village, where every-body harvests each other. The catalog comes with contributing text, “Harvesting bodies – The Farm as Paradox” by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout, and other reflections on the project.

Isabel Burr Raty is a Belgian-Chilean artist, filmmaker, and Media Art History teacher in ERG (École de Recherche Graphique), living between Brussels and Amsterdam. She is currently developing her second feature film, about the colonial impact on Easter Island, and creating live art and new media installations that queer production understandings, such as the Beauty Kit Project. Her works have been shown internationally.