Whales of Brine: Cetacean Communication and Techno (workshop by Enrique Encinas & Johanna Schütt)
What to expect:
The workshop explores alternative understandings of whale-to-whale communication with "brine", the primordial saline medium of oceans, organic cells, and human inner ears, as a guiding metaphor. We will move beyond dominant decryption and translation frameworks in contemporary cetacean communication research by repurposing specialized AI models fine-tuned on whale song. Through symbolic prompting techniques, we will transform bioacoustic data into techno tracks, generating rhythms that move us to ask how dance floor practices can generate situated insights into whale relations that resist verbal and symbolic capture.
No technical background required in music production or generative AI and participation is open to artists, designers, researchers, dancers, and listeners alike. The workshop concludes with a Live Set of Brine - a form of whale-like techno.
Participation is free but spaces are limited (20 people).
Urobors festival 2025: Permeating Noise
The soundwalk is organised as part of the Uroboros 2025 festival programme, this year following the theme Permeating Noise, inviting artistic investigations of boundary moments in space and time where different ways of knowing, doing and being interweave, transforming or dissolving one another into new forms.
Through a two-day programme featuring sound walks, multisensory lectures, art–science conversations, noise workshops, and a nocturnal dancing set, the festival seeks to explore the intersections and collisions between art and science, discipline and intuition, the human and the other-than-human.
How might we move through these porous spaces of knowledge to make sense with each other — sensibly, playfully, gracefully — and arrive at new understandings of our individual and shared worlds? What happens when we, even momentarily, abandon existing categories and canons? How can we learn to dance together – across species, contexts, disciplines?
Full Uroboros 2025 festival program: uroboros.design.
Artists' bios:
Enrique Encinas is a design researcher exploring the patterns and textures formed by (other-than) humans and technologies through creative, critical, and collaborative practice. He works as an Associate Professor in Interaction Design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), where he teaches artificial intelligence, creative coding, and designing with/in interactive spaces and environments. He is a member of the Uroboros Collective and curator of the Uroboros Festival. In recent years, he has co-led projects involving governmental, artistic, and educational institutions such as the European Union Policy Lab, the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona (CCCB), or SpeculativeEDU.
Johanna Schütt works with sound and text. With a background in comparative literature and media studies, Jojo recently completed the postgraduate ExMedia programme at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM), developing research on how sound, through its material and embodied qualities, shapes experience and meaning. Jojo performs in various live constellations and collaborates with Tanja Saban on sonic-somatic enquiry, and with Enrika Myskovskaja on Init.play, their ongoing project exploring live digital signal processing.