{tender networks}: Saturday 16th September

{tender networks} is a one-off event in Bristol that explores new possibilities for acts of resistance and life with network technologies. How are we restricted and controlled by this net? How can we use these networks to distribute radical tenderness? Five people will present work:

HEATH BUNTING has been working with communication and bureaucratic technologies since the 1990s, earning notoriety in the internet art scene. His work includes ‘BorderXing’, a document of and guide to various methods of crossing borders within the EU without papers, and a broadcast of local pirate radio stations onto the world wide web via a secret server behind a printer at the ICA in London.

JAMIE WOODCOCK is the writer of ‘Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres’, an ethnography of call centre work. In this book, call centre workers emerge as the exploited ‘human face’ of their employing businesses, alienated and dehumanised by the call centre’s technological apparatus. Jamie asks: what possibilities for resistance are left for precarious call centre workers?

RKSS (aka Robin Buckley) is a London based sound artist. Their recent works include a regular radio series for Resonance Extra called ‘Lossless Communication’, which explores sound discovery on the internet, a live improvised performance with ASMRtist Claire Tolan, and a collaborative piece with TOLE exploring the sound of vibrators: ‘Five Vibration Intensities and Five Vibration Rhythms Give Diverse Pleasures’.

SAM KIDEL is the creator of ‘Disruptive Muzak’ (Boomkat Album of the Year 2016). In this piece, Sam plays Muzak-like compositions down the phone to call-centre operatives working for the DWP and Home Office, departments which have administered the Conservative Party’s ‘austerity’ policies that continue to brutalise the most vulnerable in our society. In Sam’s recent performances, future call centre workers are imagined as networked, remote intimacy providers.

SOPHIA LOIZOU’s work projects rave signifiers into a futuristic soundscape. Listening to ‘Singulacra’ (FACTMAG top 50 albums of 2016) recalls chemically-enhanced communities dancing together in squatted warehouses and remote forest clearings. Those transgressive communities of early rave are a long way from the energy-drink sponsored, live-streamed, dancefloors of today. In what ways will the raves of the future be ‘networked’?

The event takes place at BEEF (Bristol Experimental Expanded Film) in Bristol. Entrance costs £7/£5. Get there at 19:00 as space is limited inside…