LEAF2018: Trace Reddell

Linguistic Programming of Sonic Psychotechnologies

Trace Reddell presents an audiovisual performance of sonic science fiction. Through a combination of spoken word, sound and visual synthesis, and remixing, the performance tracks science fictional word play and formal experiment from texts to the sonic innovations of films. Some literary and film history, some theory, and some original fictive elements will converge with new soundscapes and alien broadcasts. Reddell’s instruments are sonic psychotechnologies that exploit the entwined nature of psychic and cinematic apparatuses while drawing on science fiction’s capacity for cognitive estrangement – literally taking us out of our minds. As a work of science fiction in its own right, the performance shifts the emphasis on the “new” in science fiction from history, utopia/dystopia, and analogy toward other states of consciousness and new modes of being in the world. The goal of this exploration of inner/outer space is to document the patterns of conceptual and material hybridization that characterize the language and other sonorous objects of science fiction.

Trace Reddell is a writer, artist and theorist exploring the interactions of sound and the cosmological imagination. Trace’s live cinema performances and video works have screened at over thirty international venues including galleries and new media festivals in New York, London, Glasgow, Amsterdam, Berlin, Zurich, Sao Paolo, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Tehran. His first book, The Sound of Things to Come: An Audible History of the Science Fiction Film, is due out in Fall 2018 from University of Minnesota Press. Other publications include the feature essay, “Ethnoforgery and Oustider Afrofuturism,” in Dancecult (2013); “Cyborg Ritual and Sentic Technology in the Vortex Concerts,” part of the Sonic Acts’ publication, The Poetics of Space (2010); and a chapter in Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture (2006).