Festival Art Souterrain
Exhibition place
Activities
Soundscapes of an Earthly Community (2023)
Quadraphonic audio, generative sound, voice, automated apprenticeship (20 min)
Soundscapes of an Earthly Community is a spatialized sound performance that answers the call of the African philosopher Achille Mbembe, to rethink our relationships that are “more than human”, not by universality, but by the common. This thought underscores where technological progress and ecological devastation reinforce each other. A new community is invited to gather, freeing all animated organisms and offering equitable space to one another, if only to escape the existential crisis caused by necrocapitalism.
By creating a space for resonance and collective listening, Soundscapes of an Earthly Community attempts to split from the reductionist and binary separations that oppose nature and culture, human and machine, mind and body, interior and exterior. The performance guides the audience into sound regions with porous boundaries: between biological, geological, and technological life, materiality draws a common and unified environment that invites us to imagine new ways of inhabiting the world together.
Biography
Maurice Jones (he/him) is an artist, curator and researcher based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada. He is a PhD student at Concordia University where he conducts research on cultural AI commons, the history of new media art festivals, and fugitive machine agencies. From 2021 to 2025, he co-programmed the Forum MUTEK in Montreal and led the Future Festivals project. From 2016 to 2022, he was artistic director of MUTEK Tokyo. Jones also produces digital media works, notably the immersive film Iwakura, projected in a dome, and the work feral.ai, which embodies machine learning. He also leads the research-creation project Wilding AI.
Maurice Jones — Human Performer
The Sonic Agents — Non-Human Performers
Portrait XO — Piano