Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the 20th Century (In Person and Online. 24th September 2024)

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In this session, we will be joined by Esther Leslie and Sam Dolbear to discuss their new book, Dissonant Waves, which creatively explores the life and work of Ernst Schoen.

“Dissonant Waves tracks the life of Ernst Schoen—poet, composer, radio programmer, theorist, and best friend of Walter Benjamin from childhood—as he moves between Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, and London. It casts radio history and practices into concrete spaces, into networks of friends and institutions, into political exigencies and domestic plights, and into broader aesthetic discussions of the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics. Through friendship and comradeship, a position in state-backed radio, imprisonment, exile, networking in a new country, re-emigration, ill-treatment, neglect, Schoen suffers the century and articulates its broken promises.”

About our guests speakers

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include, Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto 2000), and Hollywood Flatlands, Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (Verso 2002), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005) and Walter Benjamin (Reaktion 2007), Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage(Unkant, 2014), Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (Reaktion, 2016) and, with Melanie Jackson, Deeper in the Pyramid (Banner Repeater, 2018) and The Inextinguishable (EVA International, Limerick, 2020).

Sam Dolbear holds a PhD in critical theory from Birkbeck College, University of London. Since then he was a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Language Research at the School of Advanced Study, University of London and a postdoctoral fellow at the ICI Berlin, where he worked largely on the radio producer and composer Ernst Schoen (1894–1960) and the hand reader and sexologist Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986). He is the author of Hand That Touch This Fortune Will: A History and Theory of Hand Reading after Charlotte Wolff (2024)

Session Lead: Bradley Tuck

In Person: Southern Belle, 3, Waterloo Street, Hove
The venue is not wheelchair accessible

Click to join: On Zoom

Meeting ID:878 6276 9759

Passcode: 440832

Time: 7:00 pm Doors. Start 7:30pm-10:00pm

Book: On Eventbrite

If for some reason you can’t make it and you already bought a ticket, please release it so others can come to the event. You can also email us at explodingappendix@gmail.com for any inquiries.

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Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group