Open Call: Feedback Loops Workshop at Sonic Acts Biennial 2026

Feedback Loops is a month-long critical writing and reflection workshop that explores how we listen, think, and compose text through speech and sound.

Led by artist and researcher Martina Raponi (also known as noiserr), the workshop offers access to the Sonic Acts Biennial 2026 programme – including exhibitions, concerts, and talks – which will serve as the basis for discussion. Over the sessions, participants will develop interpretive and analytical approaches to performance, theory, and transdisciplinary art.

Open to MA, rMA, and PhD students, recent graduates, established and aspiring curators, journalists, artists, and radio-makers, Feedback Loops reimagines art criticism through reparative, poetic thinking and dialogue.

In Research Is Ceremony, scholar Shawn Wilson writes: ‘Emotionless, passionless, abstract, intellectual research is a goddamn lie; it does not exist.’ Echoing this conviction, Feedback Loops questions the myth of objectivity – the idea that critique must be detached. Instead, it turns toward methods that foreground feeling, resonance, and embodied encounter, listening for where thinking meets the senses.

The process culminates at Echobox Radio, where the group gathers at the studio to share their recordings and reflections. Guest facilitator Cara Mayer – a seasoned radio-maker, audio-essayist, and DJ – will introduce techniques for shaping material for the broadcast, transforming written insight into audible form.

Through this, Feedback Loops rethinks criticism off the page. The resulting audio essays will weave together spoken word, recordings, and music – embracing non-linear, affective, and associative modes of reasoning through sound.

Building on Sonic Acts’ decade-long tradition of critical writing workshops, Feedback Loops extends this lineage into new terrains of listening, language, and transmission.

Practical Information
To join the workshop, submit your application before Wednesday 10 December, 23:59 CET via the Google form (linked here). Sonic Acts will contact the accepted participants in January 2026.

For more information, vist the website of Sonic Acts Biennial 2026.

Photo credit: Feedback Loops workshop at Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 by Bora Sekerci.