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ACCIDENTAL EDITIONS PREVIEW: Hearing The Impossible

It is with great pleasure that Accidental Editions presents ‘Hearing The Impossible’, a physical booklet of collected new sound works that are to be imagined rather than heard.

A rotten tomato from space on a collision course with the Antarctic. An elephant’s heartbeat juxtaposed with the cracking of a glacier. A device that can release the acoustic memory stored in the fabric of a building. These and other wonders are brought to us by 10 creators commissioned to produce works which exist in those rarely charted realms - the impossible.

Developed at workshops at campfr.com, these “compositions” have antecedents in Dadaism, Surrealism, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, as well as the sampled works of Matthew Herbert, curator of this volume. This, however, is a form of conceptual art in which there are no tangible outcomes, except in the ear-magination.

These are dreamworks, boldly spanning billions of years, all things in their entirety, the embedded sounds in our environment which there are no known means of retrieving, only wishing that it might be so. These might take in the untold history of labour, or the everyday accumulation of micro-digitalia and algorithms in our surveillance society.

Realised in blocks of text at right angles, or in shimmering waves, or overlaid on white and grey to encourage active engagement rather than passivity on the reader’s part, these works, for works they are, blur traditional distinctions between subject and audience, creator, listener. To read these pieces is to be a participant in the creative process. When all is impossible, everything is possible.

Contributors: Paul Greenleaf, Peter Eason Daniels, Dion Star, Rob Blazey, Thom Lucero, Sheila De Courcy, Valentin Doychinov, Alan Bob Smith, Anna Munster and Frederik Lecok
Design: Rob Blake
Foreword: David Stubbs
Executive Producer: Matthew Herbert
 
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