In Double Lives in Art and Pop Music, writer and musician Jörg Heiser argues that context switching between art and pop music is an attempt to solve the contradictions faced in one field of cultural production by moving to another. Exploring the intertwined histories of pop music and art from the early 1960s on, Heiser shows that those leading double lives are often best equipped to detect such contradictions while pointing toward radical alternatives. 

In Hecker’s multichannel installation Resynthese FAVN, the auditory stimuli produced from the objects within the exhibition space and the synthetic sounds he composed were designed to subliminally override the mechanical processes of human sense. The result was an intervention into the psychoacoustics of the audience, dramatizing their subjective experience through auditory hallucinations.

The practice of Su-Mei Tse involves issues such as time, memory, musicality, and language. Like her exhibition, “Nested,” this publication was conceived to be like a notebook: a form that brings together impressions that have occurred in everyday life—be they visual, sound, or memory related—and blends them in a subjective and intuitive way, allowing a whole network of echoes and correspondences to be deployed.

Initiated by Swedish artist Anna Lundh, Visions of the Now is a reconsideration of the 1966 Stockholm festival Visioner av Nuet (Visions of the Present), which aimed to examine the impact of technology on humanity, society, and art; half a century later, we are immersed in the technology that was still “new” in 1966.

Titled “Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium,” the eighth Contour Biennale in Mechelen, Belgium, addresses the nation-state system and the realm of justice today. The editorial approach of its accompanying reader, Hearings, borrows from the juridicial and musical spheres. Launched as the online journal of the biennial, the reader pairs texts or image-based contributions, allowing for a sense of tension and affinity to develop in the feedback loop of the two voices.