The Formula of Giving Heart: Panel Discussion and Conversation with the Artist

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding
stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the
Humanities. This panel discussion and conversation with artist
Khaled Kaddal examines The Formula of Giving Heart as a piercing
study of our contemporary socio-political environment. Drawing from
a variety of theoretical and creative perspectives, the panellists
variously explore such themes as the global increase in physical
confinement(s), the rise of cybernetics and biodata, and the
continued privileging of contemporary science/medicine as distinct
from other historical practices of healing. Exploring these
phenomena amid a backdrop of global precarity, The Formula for
Giving Heart forges fascinating linkages between seemingly
disparate phenomena. It demonstrates how spatial imprisonment
exists in and through hyperlinked and technologized (global)
networks, ancient Pharaonic languages map onto and exist as
contemporary (computer) code, and apparently distinct
socio-political events—from the Coronavirus pandemic to the 2011
Egyptian revolution—can feel familiar through the very
extraordinary nature of their temporal and affective regimes.
Exploring these themes through the world premiere of Kaddal’s
newest work, this panel broadly considers our present moment as
well as the shifting nature of sonic and visual performance during
a time of global crisis and ever increasing technologization.
Christopher Haworth is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music
at the University of Birmingham. His scholarly interests lie in the
broad areas of electronic music and sound art, which he researches
using a mixture of historiographic, philosophical, and ethnographic
research methods. He is currently researching the short-lived
'cyber theory' moment that accompanied mid-1990s hype for the
internet and World Wide Web in Britain, and he was previously an
AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellow on Music and the Internet:
Towards a Digital Sociology of Music. He also composes computer
music, often incorporating principles from psychoacoustics, music
psychology, and cybernetics. Khaled Kaddal is a Nubian visual
artist and sound performer, raised in Egypt and currently resident
in London. Allaying science and politics, spirituality and
technology, he works with two interdependent abstractions;
‘Immortality of Time’ and ‘Sovereignty of Space’, in search for the
imperishable balance between intelligence, emotions and moral
judgments. Recent solo show at Overgaden Institut for Samtidskunst,
Copenhagen; group exhibitions include ‘One the Edge’ at Science
Gallery, London; ’10 Years of Production’ at Sharjah Art
Foundation, Sharjah; ‘What do you mean, here we are?’ at Mosaic
Rooms Gallery, London; ‘Art Olympics’ at Tokyo Metropolitan
ArtMuseum, Tokyo; Performances at ‘Keep quite and Dance’ at
Cairotronica Symposium, Cairo; Zentrum der Kunster Hellerau,
Dresden; and ‘Daily Concerns’ at Dilston Grove Gallery, London.
Kaddal has an upcoming show at 5th Biennale Internationale
de Casablanca, Morocco; and a Resident Fellow at Uniarts Helsinki,
Finland. He studied Computer Science at AAST (EG), and Sound Art at
the University of the Arts London (UK). Darci Sprengel is an
ethnomusicologist and Junior Research Fellow in Music at St John’s
College, University of Oxford. Her research examines contemporary
music in Egypt at the intersections of technology, capitalism, and
politics. She is currently completing her first book, 'Postponed
Endings': Youth Music and Affective Politics in Post-Revolution
Egypt, which examines Egyptian independent music in relation to
conditions of military-capitalism. She has two additional research
projects. The first analyses music streaming technologies in the
global South using a feminist and critical race approach to digital
media. The second explores the influence of sub-Saharan African
culture in Egyptian popular culture. Christabel Stirling is a
musicologist specialising in ethnographic approaches to music and
sound art in contemporary urban environments. She is currently a
postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC-funded project ‘Sonorous
Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism’, based at the Music Faculty at
the University of Oxford. Her research explores the social
relations and coalitions that music and sound produce in their live
forms, focusing particularly on the potential for such coalitions
to transform or reinforce existing social and spatial orders.