Scale, Noise,
and Social Form

Preceding the evening performance of Mattin’s score Social Dissonance, participants in this workshop will have the opportunity to engage with the theoretical and practical underpinnings of the piece together with the artist and theorist, as well as to discuss the contemporary socioeconomic predicaments that necessitate it.

In a book of the same title, Mattin sets out a full-fledged theory of aesthetics and social forms that simultaneously emerges from his experimental practice and informs it. With a diagnosis that both resonates and problematizes Mark Fisher’s formulation of ‘capitalist realism’, Mattin takes as his starting point the various ways in which late-capitalist subjects are alienated both ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. He then treats the scene of the ‘concert’, taken to its barest elements, as an opportunity for subverting social relations:

‘I began to understand improvisation not as an interaction between musicians and their instruments, but as a collective social interaction happening in a given space where there is no neutral position (no audience, no spectators).’ (Mattin, Social Dissonance, pp. 7–8)

However, as Ray Brassier emphasizes in his foreword to the book, for Mattin it is not a question of returning to a mythical non-alienated state, but of taking alienation even further such that social noise becomes material to be collectivized, worked through, and redirected against the very conditions that generate it.

In connection to the ICI Focus Scale, participants will explore how ‘alienation works at the broadest scale, at the level of social totality’ (what Mattin calls ‘spectral objectivity’), while there is also ‘another form of alienation that exists in the most intimate scale—a phantom subjectivity’ (Mattin, SD, pp. 103-104).

Registration for the workshop is needed; no prior experience or preparatory reading is required. Participants are welcome, however, to consult Mattin’s Social Dissonance (2022) and an interview with Cécile Malaspina, available as open access PDFs, should they wish.

Link for Social Dissonance
Link for Malaspina interview

Separate registration for the performance of Social Dissonance the same evening can be done here.

Mattin is an artist, musician and theorist working conceptually with noise and improvisation. Through his collaborative practice, writing and pedagogy, he explores performative forms of estrangement as a way to deal with structural alienation. He has exhibited and performed worldwide including documenta14 (Athens and Kassel), Performa (NYC), Shanghai Biennial, Arika (Glasgow), Galerias Municipais (Lisbon) and Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid). In 2022, Urbanomic/MIT Press published his book Social Dissonance and in 2012, CAC Brétigny and Tuamaturgia published Unconsitituted Praxis. Along with Anthony Iles he has edited the books Noise & Capitalism (Kritika/Arteleku 2009) and Abolishing Capitalist Totality (Minor Compositions 2026). Since 2020, he co-hosts the podcast Social Discipline with Miguel Prado. Prado and Mattin are also part of Noise Research Union (NRU) with Cécile Malaspine, Sonia de Jager, Martina Raponi, Patricia Reed and Inigo Wilkins. He has taught and lectured in institutions such as Cal Arts, Bard College, Paris VIII, Princeton University, Dutch Arts Institute and HDK-Valand. Mattin is an associate professor at the Tromsø Academy of Arts at UiT–The Arctic University of Norway.

Mattin

Nicolas Helm-Grovas and José Antonio Magalhães

If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.

Still from Social Dissonance (video), documenta14, Athens, 2017.
Mattin. No rights reserved.