Queer Sonic Fingerprint w/ Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz

The six-channel sound installation Queer Sonic Fingerprint, created by sound artist Adam Pultz and anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker was recently produced in and shown at Art Laboratory Berlin. Queer Sonic Fingerprint speculatively imagines non-normative relations around cultural belongings in ethnological museums and beyond. The installation amplifies the collection‘s materiality through the impulse response recordings—or, more poetically, sonic fingerprints—of ethnographic objects. In the installation, the fingerprints are subjected to a genetic algorithm that continually produces new generations of fingerprints carrying the acoustic properties of their ancestors. Isabel and Adam describe the creation of the installation, discuss how sound may elucidate non-normative relations, and talk about why a queerfeminist critique of evolutionary computing is relevant and how it may produce new sonorities.

For a detailed step-by-step explanation of sonic fingerprinting and evolutionary computing, follow this link.

Biographies:

Isabel Bredenbröker is a social and cultural anthropologist working between art and academia. They hold a DFG Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Fellowship which is based between the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) and the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik at Humboldt University Berlin. Isabel's work focusses on material and visual culture, anthropology of art and museums, queer theory and intersectionality, situatedness and autoethnography, colonialism, cleaning and waste. They have produced ethnographic films, worked with field recording and (co-)curated as well as contributed to exhibitions in museum and contemporary art contexts. Isabel's book ‘Rest in Plastic: Death, time and synthetic materials in a Ghanaian Ewe community’ is forthcoming with Berghahn.

Adam Pultz Melbye is a double bass player, composer, and improviser working in the field of acoustic and electronic sound. Adam's work spans live performance, sound installation, sound for dance, theatre, film, multimedia, sculpture, algorithmic design, and instrument building. They have performed and exhibited work in Europe, Australia, the US, and Japan, while appearing on close to 50 albums. Adam often performs with semi-autonomous feedback systems, such as the FAAB (feedback-actuated augmented bass). Adam holds a practice-led PhD in music technology from SARC, Queen's University Belfast.