AMY CUTLER AND ELLA FINER WITH LUCY MERCER AND JAMES WILKES
The
Year Without a Summer – A night writers’ salon
25.11.22 at 19.00
Friday 25 November 19:00–23:00
KELDER, 26A Chapel Market, London N1 9EN
This event is by invitation only, but if you would like to join please email studio@kelderprojects.com with a short description of your work and why you would like to be part of the event.
Experiments in Company hosts a night writers’ salon: a gathering for those who write into the night, whether for the love of what the night offers as a space of unknown possibilities, for the aesthetics and atmospherics of the night, or whether for necessity, because it is the only time we are alone with the illusion of endless time ahead of us. Taking its cue from the year without a summer – the phenomenal climactic event of 1816, a volcanic winter plunging temperatures worldwide – the evening will respond to the affective atmospherics of changing light. From the historic tephra infused sunsets of 1816 to our current experiences writing under polluted city skies – the stars obscured by what we have created – we will talk and work into the night, the space of the salon like our own dark sky preserve.
The audiovisual installation in KELDER’s project space will be redesigned again for this third stage of the residency, using the blackout space to explore the darkness-dependent design of cinema as a nocturnal ecological niche.
Dr. Amy Cutler is a live cinema artist, composer, ecologist and designer. Her background as a geographer informs her AV interventions and speculative cinema designs, each aiming to unsettle the dominant formula of our environmental perspectives (including the sovereignty of ‘so-called Man’). Recent projects include The Live Earth Show on the Gas Tower spatial cinema stage at Glastonbury Festival 2022; Living Nature Cinema, a 2022–23 residency on bio-art and de-extinction practices with the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity; LULL (2021), an ambisonics soundscape at Iklectik using interactive ultra-sonar sensing and inspired by jellyfish blackouts and strike actions; the touring live cinema opera NATURE’S NICKELODEONS, which most recently took place at The Exploratorium, San Francisco; and bespoke moving-image observatories for locations including Lud’s Church ravine/landslip and Pendle Hill, with its history as an experimental site for atmospheric sensing. She is interested in pathetic fallacy, expanded media and the urgency of new designs for audience in the Anthropocene. She has also released five albums, ranging from experimental electronics to rage aria to live metallurgy.
www.amycutler.net
www.amycutler.net
Ella Finer’s work in sound and performance spans writing, composing and curating with a particular interest in how women’s voices take up space; how bodies acoustically disrupt, challenge or change occupations of space. Her research continuously queries the ownership of cultural expression through sound; often through collaborative projects centring listening as a practice of deep attention, affiliation and reciprocity. Recent work includes her collaboration with Vibeke Mascini, Silent Whale Letters, which will be published by Sternberg in 2023; continuing iterations of Burning House/Burning Horse (first commissioned by Almanac) and Wind Study, a tape of 8 elemental re-mixes produced with Flora Pitrolo.
She is currently finishing her first book Acoustic Commons and the Wild Life of Sound, a work considering the inherent power in/of that which falls outside of administrative control – as a way of thinking through the sonic as critical agitator: how sound resists categorisation in the archive; how sound makes and disperses knowledge beyond the bounds of the institutional building.
She is currently finishing her first book Acoustic Commons and the Wild Life of Sound, a work considering the inherent power in/of that which falls outside of administrative control – as a way of thinking through the sonic as critical agitator: how sound resists categorisation in the archive; how sound makes and disperses knowledge beyond the bounds of the institutional building.
Lucy Mercer’s first
poetry collection Emblem (Prototype, 2022) is the Poetry Book Society Summer
Choice. She teaches creative writing at Goldsmiths.
James Wilkes is
interested in how ideas and practices from sound art, translation and the life
sciences inflect the writing of poetry, short fiction and performance scores.
He collaborates across disciplines and artforms and has held residencies at
UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Wellcome Collection, and Medical
Museion. His most recent publication is Mille Regretz: Chansons After
Josquin des Prez (Pamenar Press, 2022).