Send message to Contributor

Contribution short abstract

In their multichannel sound installation Queer Sonic Fingerprint, sound artist Adam Pultz and anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker speculatively imagine non-normative relations around artefacts in ethnological museums and beyond.

Contribution long abstract

For the exhibition 'Out of Focus' at the RJM, we propose an audio work that was created collaboratively during research on queering ethnological museums collections. Queer Sonic Fingerprint was previously shown at Art Laboratory Berlin (2024) and sonically engages with ethnographic collection artefacts, hereby breaking with the visual primary and no-touch policy of museums. The work is based on a collection of 'sonic fingerprints' (also known as impulse responses)—sounds that represent the acoustic properties of items in different collections. These sounds populate a genetic algorithm, an AI tool that simulates kin relations. Through this algorithm, the sonic fingerprints of collection artefacts can reproduce, exchange acoustic properties, mutate and relate to each other. The genetic algorithm we have created, however, does not rely on a Darwinian model of evolution and kinship, but is instead queered, meaning that is inspired by work from the anthropology of kinship, queer kinship, speculative fiction, and alternative biological concepts such as epigenetics and endosymbiosis. Alongside the evolving sounds of new possible artefacts in this sonic ecology, the work features field recordings of museum spaces and depots, conversations with museum practitioners, private 'collectors' and other experts, as well as with people using artefacts that are commonly held in ethnographic museum collections today. Depending on the requirements of the exhibition, the work can be installed as a live-generating four-channel installation or as a fixed-media piece on headphones. If possible, the installation can feature sonic fingerprints of artefacts in the RJM's collection.