Gamelan, made up predominantly of percussive instruments, is the traditional ensemble music of the Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese peoples of Indonesia. In JOGET-X (A Speculative Archive of Alternate Histories of Indonesian Dance Music), Aditya Surya Taruna explores the diversity of Gamelan music to construct a speculative archive of Indonesian dance music. The project asks; what if colonisation did not affect how music, technology and dance has developed? Exploring the oral traditions and knowledge systems of indigenous culture, the project investigates how these knowledge systems can coexist with and contextualise global understandings of technology and music. The archive will contain historical data from 1980-2020. Existing histories will be hacked and deconstructed in collaboration with six musicians and dancers from Jakarta to Wamena (West Papua), through the process of Laras, an Indonesian tuning method. As well as this archive, the artist is developing a set of open source digital instruments that are built with the methods and processes of Gamelan music.

Noticing The Preconditions For ___________.  is an experiment in durational correspondence between artists Romi Ron Morrison and Mimi Onuoha. In this project, noticing takes an archival form, indexing passing moments of care each artist notices in their daily life. Observing the tension between two worlds – one desperately trying to reproduce its power, and a new world not yet allowed to be born – the project aims to collect traces of this new world found in the present. These moments are archived and are intended to act as instructions that reveal Black futures in quotidian practices of care and kinship. The database reveals future potential, and acts as a guide for the various ways the artist and their collaborator wish to coexist together.

The Subterranean Imprint Archive is an ongoing research project that traces the legacy of extractive technologies in Central and Southern Africa. The starting point of this inquiry is in the underground of the Shinkolobwe mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the uranium used in the Manhattan Project to create the atom bomb was extracted. The residency marks a new chapter of this project, focused on locating the key moments surrounding nuclearity on the continent. Through visual strategies which manipulate global mapping technologies, this chapter asks if we can dislocate, re-map, complicate, and exploit existing models to deepen and disrupt the discourse on technopolitics in Africa and abroad. This work seeks to layer narratives that are usually kept distinct and to visualize these historical and technological entanglements.

The first event of “What Stays – Archiving Care” was a panel on counter-archival practices, their values and meaning for different communities and how they change the nature of memory. How and what a society remembers has becomes a key question at a time when self-perceptions are being re-negotiated and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are being questioned. What do we value and want to preserve? What histories demand to be foregrounded and what should be left behind? These questions connect directly to the future of cultural archives, that have become spaces where accounts of histories are contested and expanded through acts of resistance and refusal.

Guest on panel was Maya Indira Ganesh, she has been working at the intersection of new media, digital technologies, gender, visual advocacy and activism and human rights as a researcher, writer, and information-activist. She spent the past eight years with Tactical Technology Collective in Bangalore and Berlin where she was the Director of Applied Research. The exhibition “how to move an arch” by Sinthujan Varatharajah was part of the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. In this work, Varatharajah reads Berlin through the flight movements of a traumatized people through what was then, in the 1980s, a divided city. Their living archive interrogates the many struggles for a people without sovereignty over land (and bodies) to mark spaces across different political regimes and to build as well as maintain stable archives. The talk was moderated by Nora O Murchú who became the artistic director of transmediale in 2020. In their research and curatorial practice, they examine intersections between the fields of art, design, software studies, and politics.

In the context of the discussion event the artists of the digital residency program Aditya Surya Taruna, Romi Ron Morrison, Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson will present their works.