Text by CLOT Magazine
Designer Noam Youngrak Son inscribes myths for the underrepresented in various mediums, from books to performances to 3D-printed sex toys. Their identity as queer people of colour is one of the crucial axes of their design practices. They are excited about the unexpectedness that a well-designed fiction can open up and the critical political discussions that it may cultivate.
On Saturday 26 March, from 14:00 to 17:00 CET, Noam Youngrak Son presents The Story-Telling Eel-Orgy: Writing as an Aquatic Intercourse, a hybrid storytelling workshop with Sonic Acts.
Taking inspiration from the complex and enduringly obscure reproductive cycle of eels, the workshop involves collaborative and generative writing processes, with participants producing short stories about water that will be combined into a riso-printed zine.
In the workshop, the process of blending bodily histories will be demonstrated using a simple algorithm called a Markov Chain, a model ‘describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event’.
Applied to generative writing, a Markov chain can be used to find the most probable phrase that will come after a specific phrase—in other words, an endless stream of text starting from the first word. The short stories created by participants will become the source materials for the algorithm to construct hybrid myths, like infant eels emerging from the Sargasso Sea.
This workshop forms part of a new series of events, Sonic Acts Practicum, focused on informal education and sharing knowledge between artists and researchers. Participants can join online or in person at W139 in Amsterdam.
Find tickets here.
