Workshop | Joe Namy
“that vibration that’s always necessary for transcendence” * is a two-day workshop led by artist and musician Joe Namy exploring listening and sound making as tools to read and transform the environments we inhabit. Through listening sessions, sound making exercises, and discussions on the politics of music and sound, it seeks to cultivate a conscious sonic attention, allowing us to move away from what is imposed on us to hear towards what we choose to listen to. Participants will delve into sound maps and mixtapes to enquire how collections of sound have been used and test how they can be used to intervene and transform the experience of our sonic and social surroundings. A background in working with sound is not required; artists working in any medium are welcome to participate. The workshop will be conducted in English, but collective translation is encouraged if needed. * The title of the workshop is a quote from an interview with Egyptian musician, composer, educator and early electronic music pioneer Halim El Dabh. Joe Namy (b.1978, Lansing, USA) is an artist and musician based between Beirut and London, whose practice encompasses sound, its history and impact on the built environment. Working collaboratively through public sculptures and performances, Namy’s work considers the social construction of sound and the political forces that enable its transmission. As well, the artist’s work critically engages with the gender dynamics of sound, migration patterns of instruments, and the translation between languages, between score and sound, and between instruments and bodies in movement and dance. Other projects by Namy explore the history and resonance of opera houses across eleven countries in the Middle East, and the archive of Arab American musician Halim El-Dabh, a pioneer of electronic music (Wire Recorder Piece, 1944).