Feedback Loops is a month-long critical writing and reflection workshop exploring how we listen, think, and compose text through speech and sound. Led by artist and researcher Martina Raponi (also known as noiserr), the workshop uses the Sonic Acts Biennial 2026 programme – exhibitions, concerts, film screenings, and talks – as shared material for collective inquiry. Participants develop new interpretive approaches to performance, theory, and transdisciplinary art through discussion and experiment.

Please note that applications for this workshop are now closed.

Open to students, emerging researchers, curators, journalists, artists, and radio-makers, the workshop reimagines criticism as a reparative, poetic, and embodied practice. Drawing on Raponi’s research into noise and complexity, participants work with diagramming, a collaborative mapping method that tests alternatives to conventional cultural criticism. Inspired by scholar Shawn Wilson’s assertion that ‘emotionless, passionless, abstract, intellectual research is a goddamn lie’, Feedback Loops challenges the myth of objectivity and listens instead for where thinking meets sensation.

The workshop culminates in a session at Echobox Radio. During a session guided by guest facilitator Cara Mayer – a radio-maker, audio-essayist, and DJ – participants will learn techniques for shaping material for broadcast. Mayer will assist with translating reflections into audio essays that weave together spoken word, field recordings, music, and associative forms 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, in dialogue with the Biennial theme Melted for Love.

A collaboration between Paradiso and Sonic Acts. Part of New Perspectives for Action, a project by Re-imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.