Pre-apocalyptic fairy tales, emotional topography of personal landscapes, the archaeology of the human soul. Narcotic journey into the noisy rites and industrial myths of our dark corners.

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Voice Figures

"Voice Figures" release has been inspired by the research of Margaret Watts Hughes and her eidophone tool for visualising specific frequencies, geometrical & natural forms produced by vibrations of the human voice.

"At first, when directing the voice against the semi-liquid mass upon the centre of the disc, there is a feeling as if some impassable barrier were encountered and that it would be as easy to move a mountain with a push of the hand as to set that colour heap moving by the action of a note." (Margaret Watts Hughes)


I performed a variation on this experiment based on recording multiple singled frequencies generated by tuning forks, frequency generator and gong, which resonated on the metal surface and inside the soil. I captured reverberated metal surface, secondary resonation through the soil and oscillation of the bowl. The experiment is accompanied by recordings of water, coffee beans, my voice and string recordings in varied pitch and velocities.

Unbutton the Buttons

Gender equality is not only a basic human right, but its achievement has enormous socio-economic ramifications. Empowering women fuels thriving economies, spurring productivity and growth. Yet gender inequalities remain deeply entrenched in every society. Women lack access to decent work and face occupational segregation and gender wage gaps. They are too often denied access to basic education and health care. Women in all parts of the world suffer violence and discrimination. They are under-represented in political and economic decision-making processes.
(UN Women)

What problems are faced by thousands of women and girls every day but remain suppressed and therefore unresolved? Why do we learn about many social afflictions from the tabloids and not from those who need help and represent the interests of vulnerable women? How to implement the principle of "Nothing about Us without Us"?

Nemamrada

1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner. This includes a range of behaviors (e.g. slapping, shoving, pushing) and in some cases might not be considered "domestic violence." 1 in 7 women and 1 in 25 men have been injured by an intimate partner.

Globally, violence against women disproportionately affects low- and lower-middle-income countries and regions. Thirty-seven per cent of women aged 15 to 49 living in countries classified by the Sustainable Development Goals as "least developed" have been subject to physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence in their life. Twenty-two per cent of women living in "least developed countries" have been subjected to intimate partner violence in the past 12 months—substantially higher than the world average of 13 per cent.

At least 200 million women and girls, aged 15–49 years, have undergone female genital mutilation in 31 countries where the practice is concentrated. Half of these countries are in West Africa. There are still countries where female genital mutilation is almost universal; where at least 9 in 10 girls and women, aged 15–49 years, have been cut.

During the past decade, the global rate of child marriage has declined, with the global proportion of young women aged 20–24 years who were married before the age of 18 decreasing by 15 per cent, from nearly one in four in 2010 to one in five in 2020. As a result of this progress, the child marriages of some 25 million girls have been averted. However, the profound effects of the pandemic are threatening this progress, with up to 10 million additional girls at risk of child marriage in the next decade as a result of the pandemic.

There is no evidence of progress in Latin America and the Caribbean, as levels of child marriage remain as high as they were 25 years ago.

Globally, 6 per cent of women report they have been subjected to sexual violence from someone other than their husband or partner. However, the true prevalence of non-partner sexual violence is likely to be much higher, considering the particular stigma related to this form of violence.

More data:
www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/research-and-data

(NCADV, WHO, UN WOMEN)

Mind the Gap

How can we design environments in which both boys and girls thrive? Creating a behavioural design supporting each group helps—creativity, data and experimentation help.

Thoughtful design architecture will help.
The evidence strongly suggests that it is almost impossible for us to assess ourselves objectively, and debiasing a population that thinks more highly of themselves than others is very challenging.

Prevent gender bias from having an impact: use gender-neutral designs.
Mitigate the impact of gender bias on yourself and others. Give feedback to help people correct their biases.
(Bohnet)

Fix the Difference

Under the banner of "inclusion", initiatives sometimes focus only on "helping the minority" or "fixing the women" rather than also engaging the majority and those fitting the implicit norms.

When this becomes about fixing the difference and the people instead of changing the implicit norms in the organizations and society, this will not lead to inclusive change but rather assimilation.

Progress will remain a "minority" or "women's" issue without including the majority. This carries profound impact penalties for those who do not fit the established and often unacknowledged majority norms.

It masks the organizational culture and behavioural norms changes that are needed, which prevents them from being addressed.
It also furthers the positioning of inclusion on an "us versus them" framing, perpetuating fragmentation rather than unity and collective action.
(Kempinski & Nielsen)

Feel the Need

G Only having a rational understanding of the need is not sufficient for sustained motivation and behavioural change.

To succeed means motivating people to change behaviour and engaging groups in making profound change for inclusiveness by making the brain's unconscious system feel the need for change.

Show implications of bias rather than tell people that they are biased. The purpose is to create more vital ownership for the needed changes.
(Kempinski & Nielsen)

Framing Perceptions

By flipping perceptions, priming specific associations, appealing to identity, altering the frame or changing the anchor of the thought process, we can frame perceptions to increase inclusion in behaviours and cultures.

Terms like diversity, inclusion, gender, and equality can trigger sensitivity for most people because they are associated with some kind of status quo change. T

his discomfort stems from our unconscious mind, which would prefer to stay with the status quo because it does not like the uncertainty that change brings.

The terms can trigger the fear of losing privileges, status, safety and power. To avoid these automatic emotional reactions, we should aim to alter and create new associations of such terms by framing positive or at least neutral associations.
(Kempinski & Nielsen)

Video by Davide Belotti
Music by Nina Pixel

Music for a Dialogue

Dedicated to everyone who identifies as a woman, feels like a goddess, rules like a female warrior, or desires to embrace their feminine energy in all shapes and complexity.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

All profits go to:

Ukrainian Woman's Fund uwf.org.ua & UN Women
www.unwomen.de/helfen/hilfe-fuer-frauen-und-maedchen-in-der-ukraine.html

Music: Nina Pixel
Voices:
Giorgia Belotti
Lucia Bielik
Paulína Šmatláková

JUST ASK HER. project initiated by Radoslav Piovarči

Cover: a still from JUST ASK HER. teaser by Davide Belotti
Dancers: Giorgia Belotti, Lucia Bielik, Paulína Šmatláková
Mastering and support: Andreas Bonkowski at Magic Window

Music created for the contemporary dance theatre "JUST ASK HER." January 2022.

JUST ASK HER. deals with questions about gender-related issues. Three women are portraying what it means to be limited, silenced and categorized. What are the solutions to treat each other equally? When will we realize the importance of this topic? The performance is a place for opening all possible questions about unfairness in society.

Cooperation:
Radoslav Piovarči
Slovak Arts Council
Giorgia Belotti
Lucia Bielik
Paulína Šmatláková
Gabriela Čechová
Nina Pixel
Bombura klub
Synagóga Brezno
Mesto Brezno
Jakub Bielik
Lucia Piovarči
Casper Preisler

~~~ modes of motion ~~

/

"He who understands the Principle of Vibration has grasped the sceptre of Power" (Kybalion)

Everything flows out and in, everything has its tides, all things rise and fall.

"Many other methods of raising power will also act to synchronise the participants in a ritual. The essence of magical dance is that it should be a frenetic circumambulation of a circle about a fixed point, accompanied by collective mantric invocations."
(Lieber Null & Psychonaut)

/

Music From Ancestral Archeology | Secrets of the Fern

An ancient Slavic myth of the fern flower symbolises everything that one seeks but what is, in fact, unattainable.

Fern Flower is rooted in the Slavic tale in which the fern is an unreachable and alluring plant existing only in the realm of delusion.

The legends say that only the fern that grows in the most secluded forests can bloom with the magickal flower and sometimes with a magickal fruit. It has to be a place far away from the human villages, where no dog barking, rooster crowing or people talking could be heard.

The fern gives birth to the flower around midnight, and a loud sound described as a crack, a bang, or a thunder follows its birth. The flower shines with a golden, purple or blue glow. It is extremely delicate: blooms only shortly and dies before dawn or lives only less than an hour.

According to the folk legends, a person who manages to find the flower will be filled with exceptional supernatural wisdom that would bring happiness to their life or be given great wealth and power.

Imagine layers of the soil. Dirt elements stacked on the previous epoch. Imagine civilizations living on the top floor of their ancestor's habitats. Wisdom, memories, history, myths, poems, songs, fears, all connected via deep roots of shared consciousness.

How do your roots feel? How does the soil of your home taste? What is the sound of your skin? Music and visuals inspired by Slovak folklore and anthropology in connection to our personal narratives.

Folklore without old narratives. Queer and feminist forms incorporated into the new story of our identities.

What about retelling the narrative of our present? Who are we and what do we remember? What are our values and what do we believe in? What is the „real“ face of our identity and which one is your favourite? What is our story to tell?

Music From Ancestral Archeology | Difference and Repetition

“The voice is always dead, and only out of some desperate denial, we call it living. We call this irreplaceable loss a modulation. Modulation is a voice to the extent that it has always passed. It has been silenced.”
Roland Barthes

What Is The Story You Want To Tell?

In the past, people with special skills, knowledge or just ones looked different from the middle part of the bell curve, those people were persecuted. Burned and accused of not being good for society. Why shall we create shallow and uniform societies with only one type of people? Why can't we cherish differences, various genders, multiple identities and the power of weirdness? This is the main magic that we are burning when we decide to fit into one uniform.

Folklore For The New Era

What are the stories we want to tell our relatives, friends or kids? Traditions used to be heteronormative, roles defined and lives predestined. Future folklore does not have to be like that. How does our stamp in the cultural map look like? Like us.

Dance, raving at night and repetition in the music compositions stays in our culture and evolves since we reacted to the first vibration with our bodies. Movement without prescribed gender roles and predefined steps is an attribute of freedom. A choice we are making when we decide to move as we want.

A semantic Memory, Simulacrum of Reality

In Baudrillard's concept, like Nietzsche's, simulacra are perceived as negative, but another modern philosopher who addressed the topic, Gilles Deleuze, takes a different view, seeing simulacra as the avenue by which an accepted ideal or "privileged position" could be "challenged and overturned".

Deleuze defines simulacra as "those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself.
What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance".
(Deleuze, Gilles (1968).
Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. Columbia: Columbia University Press. p. 69)  

Glass Horse

Glass horses can live inside trees or abandoned shacks or dark caves or near rivers, ponds and wells. They enter the human world during the spring, staying until autumn. During the winter, they live in mythical villas and castles. After they die, each glass horse gets a mansion.

Glass horses are gorgeous beings with an affinity for fire. They have the power to bring about drought, burn a farmer's crops, or make animals die of high fever. It is said that, when excited, glass horses can change their appearance and turn into monstrous bird capable of throwing fire at their rivals.

Accompanied and following only the rhythm of the breeze and their chanting, their dance was said to have been often witnessed by lost travellers, seduced by the sorcery of their song and resemble, only to die of exhaustion at dawn, when the glass horses finally disappeared.

From our Future Selves

Recorded live at Punctum - Krásovka.
Presented by Susana Benesova & Punctum
Recordings mastered at Mustakillah Studio.

credits

released December 13, 2018

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BLACK ACID is the darkness eating us from the inside when we are not watching. Your fears you are running from. It is you. It is me.



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VIDA VOJIĆ is a sound expressionist from Berlin. Vessel of unconscious secrets. Vocal manipulation/introverted beats/nostalgic ambiences/electrified outbursts.

vidavojic.tumblr.com







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PTLVS004 | Black Acid / Vida Vojic

by Punctum Tapes

BIAS LOOP

Is there a reality that is fundamental to human beings?

“Yesterday’s truth is today’s deception and yesterday’s false inference may be tomorrow’s revelation.” (C.G.Jung)

Oscillating between sense and nonsense, conscious is dancing with subconscious, all realities vibrating towards non linear freedom from opposites.

What is real and what is a bias we have to step out of?




(this version of reality is supported by Re-Imagine Europe & A4 - priestor súčasnej kultúry as a part of BIAS LOOP composition)

PALM READER

The other day I have met a man reading palms and offering a piece of very reasonable advice > to become a farmer of our bodies - farm your health - farm your conversations - actions - view yourself as a farmer - farm your breath - change the context - cultivate - farm you!

This is a topic which popped up after meeting that misterious palm reader and recording his predictions - lot of material left over - much to process, so I decided to create this little boiling techno witchcraft project. s a




A pre-apocalyptic fairy tale on the unsustainable direction of our values. Darkrooms vs. All leaders summits, rape of the planet vs hedonistic selftered indulgence. Fortune teller story of your present.

Samples:
John Giorno poems
Greta Thunberg

What will happen once we want to escape - glitch and distort our “Self” as a recorded program?
The sound of organic cello strings, voices, noises from the streets, talks, animals, wind and nature are being transformed into a different level - new realities - malformed - biases - skewed and looped.
Self is a projection. Same as the XYZ scales we live in. Is it who we really are or who we really want to be? Destruction of our Selves, society and nature created a pattern. Constantly dying and being recreated again and again in the loop. How many times we have to die to realize we have never lived? We are going to be lost, running from our own awareness till we stop, turn around and look outside. When we decide to let go our ego - when we let our Self die, only then we are able to reconnect.

Wisdom, memories, history, myths, poems, songs, fears, all connected via deep roots of shared consciousness.
Dirt elements stacked on the previous epoch.

Imagine civilizations living on the top floor of their ancestor's habitats. Is the consciousness of the contemporary mind interconnected like the web made out of the tree roots?

Do we feel the same about our mythology? How does the present face of Slovak folklore look like?

.........................................

"Until the White Morning"

The effort to deconstruct and destroy conventions in Slovak folklore contributed to the creation of the performance and video "Until the White Morning". By translating folklore into queer and feminist forms, new folklore is created, without gender stereotypes, sexism and patriarchy. And finally, how else would Friday end in 21st-century folklore if not a rave in the woods until white morning.

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Cast: Tina Hrevušová, Joanka Taorogińska, Tomáš Košarišťan, Jerguš Paučula
Camera: Lívia Valková
Music: Nina Pixel
Edits: Martina Pavlíková