DAY 1 – Thursday, 4. September
16:00-18:00 „Neptune Frost“. Screening
Saul Williams & Anisia Uzeyman: „Neptune Frost“ (2021) english + subtitles, 105 min
18:00-19:30 „Debris & Memory“ Listening session
with Matti Gajek, moderated by Samo Zeichen
Matti Gajek invites us to join him to listen to music from his archive, spanning three decades of experimental music produced in the GDR. Experimental music was mostly frowned upon by the state during the GDR era; equipment was very hard to come by. A lot of imagination was needed to be able to make music freely. After the reunification, this legacy was not given much attention, a lot of the music was forgotten. Together with Samo Zeichen, we will listen and discuss archives, memory, youth culture, nostalgia, ghosts, and emotions.
DAY 2 – Friday, 5. September
13:00-14:30 „Infinity Minus Infinity“. Screenings
The Otolith Group: „Infinity Minus Infinity“ (2019)
Black Quantum Futurism: „Write No History“ (2021)
Black Quantum Futurism: „Time Travel Machine“ (2017)
The Otolith Group was founded in 2002 by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. Its work is research-based and spans the moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation. It incorporates film-making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face.
Black Quantum Futurism is an interdisciplinary creative practice between Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) and Rasheedah Phillips that weaves quantum physics and Afrodiasporan concepts of time, ritual, text, and sound, creating counterhistories and Black quantum futures that challenge exclusionary, mainstream versions of time.
14:30-15:30 „Recursive Futures… Precarious Crossings: „heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs“*. Conversation
Jessica Edwards in conversation with Mikkel Rørbo
In this conversation, Jessica Edwards‘ presentation on the temporal vacuoles of fugitivity, explored through the historical context of the Transatlantic Middle Passage and the contemporary Middle Passage of the illegalised precarious crossings, forms the starting point. Through conversation with researcher Mikkel Rørbo, the two will consider the sounding of bodies, the sharing of embodied knowledges, and the entanglements of racial capitalism, histories and futurities while reflecting on the manifold themes presented through the films of The Otolith Group and Black Quantum Futurism.
15:30-16:30 „Planeten Zeiten Denken“. Gespräch (dt)
Armen Avanessian im Gespräch mit Shilla Strelka
Im Rahmen seiner kurzen Keynote wird Armen Avanessian skizzieren, warum wir überhaupt erst lernen müssen, was es heißt, auf einem Planeten zu leben, wenn dieser nicht mehr als ein lebloses Stück Materie betrachtet wird, sondern eine lebendige Rhythmusmaschine der Evolution. Im Anschluß soll auch diskutiert werden, wie es sich in einem zunehmend mit Informationen (und Kontrolle!) aus der Zukunft geprägten Regime der Hyperantizipation lebt, in der sich biographische und planetarische Zeitrhythmen in einer neuen Biografischen Tiefenzeit verschränken.
16:30-18:00 „Resonant Futures. Haunted Archives and Technologies of Resistance“. Panel Discussion
with Huda Takriti, Frida Robles, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, moderated by Tayla Myree
This panel examines the shifting relationships between memory, archives, and technologies in contexts shaped by colonial histories and displacement. Resonant Futures considers how memory persists in bodies, communities, digital traces, and artistic practice. The haunted archive appears in fragments, returns, and interruptions, where past and present resurface and contend with one another through story, image, sound, and silence. The talk invites participants to inhabit the uncertainties and dissonances that mark memory. What continues to live on? Where does silence protect, and where does it constrain? How might futures emerge from critical reckonings with what continues to haunt the present?
DAY 3 – Saturday, 6. September
15:00-16:30 „Endcore: The Chronopolitics of Doomscrolling“. Panel Discussion
w/ Martyna Marciniak, Sara Bezovšek, Martina Menegon, moderated by Sophie Publig
Endcore: The Chronopolitics of Doomscrolling brings together artists Sara Bezovšek, Martyna Marciniak, and Martina Menegon to explore how digital cultures reshape our sense of time. From doomscrolling, microtrends and algorithmic acceleration to glitch and the machinic rhythms of AI, the discussion traces how digital temporalities emerge, collapse, and can be resisted. We will ask how artistic practices not only reflect but also intervene in these shifting chronopolitics, and what strategies of deceleration and re-entanglement with time might be possible.
16:30-18:00 „Deep Time Loops“. Keynote
with Elijah & open discussion, moderated by মm.
For this year’s edition of Unsafe+Sounds Festival, London-based writer, DJ and creator of the instagram sensation, ‚Yellow Squares,‘ Elijah will deliver a keynote on the role of time as a creative force in current digital ecosystems of cultural work. [insert a title for the keynote] will bring Elijah’s current work in conversation with practices of quick work, output and feedback loops with the audience so as to capture discourses of the present time. Foregrounded by possibilities of the internet as a medium for digital cultures and public discourse, Elijah’s keynote brings his worlds of music, DIY-practices and subcultures together.
EXHIBITION PROGRAMME curated by Brooklyn Pakathi
with Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Frida Robles, Huda Takriti
The exhibition Past Tense invites us into an intimate encounter with time as a political dimension. Through installation and media art, the works expose how temporal frameworks structure power and ask how other temporalities might emerge when memory, sound, and image intervene in historical silences. Each work functions as a temporal intervention. They move beyond representation and actively reconfigure how time is experienced.
Venue: ifk arkaden, Reichsratsstraße 17, 1010 Wien, Austria
Opening: Wed, 3. September – 16:00
Opening Hours: Wed, 3. September, 16:00-18:00 | Thu, 4. September, 15:00-20:00 | Fri, 5. September, 12:00-18:30 | Sat, 6. September, 14:00-18:30
„Splitting Image“ Installation by Beta Now Beta
Now is collaborating with Unsafe+Sounds during their discoursive programme through an installation called „Splitting Image“. It is an experimental live visualization whhich acts as an artistic translation engine, transforming the discourses into visual forms and lasting media. As talks unfold, spoken contributions are analyzed in real-time for their conceptual connections and thematic clusters, then translated into visual imagery. The lectures become drawings. Beta Now is a Co.Lab at the University of Arts Linz, conceived as a Space for performative Image. Here, images are explored in their performative potentials, especially when they emerge in improvisational situations and when sound, body, and space merge into a pictorial expression. The Co.Lab pursues the question of which performative principles guide images in these contexts.
Unsafe+Sounds Festival 2025
„Time Dream Rhythm Machine“
02 – 07. September 2025
Tickets & Further Information – www.unsafeandsounds.com
