Unfolding over two days, this symposium of discourse and listening events is prompted by the ancient and enduring relationship between clocks and instruments, and music and time. Organised by Rachael Rakes and Xenia Benivolski, the sessions bring together artists who build, rearrange, and manipulate instruments, and study the various scales of temporal perception transmitted through natural and augmented sound.  

The illustrated lecture introduces several propositions around the co-extant worlds of time and sound. With attention to the vast beat-making elements in the natural and manufactured world, Benivolski and Rakes discuss how instruments express time as a social and cosmic force. From a broad definition of what may constitute an instrument, they trace a trans-geographical history of musical instruments that double as clocks, and clocks that mechanise instruments. Through this they explore how the material elements of sound can be a temporal, a-temporal, and territorial witness. Drawing on genealogies of mechanisation and automation, and physiological and biological rhythms, the discussion leads into a survey of contemporary practices, and the musicians, tinkerers, and collaborations that produce new challenges to studies of the audible, terrestrial, dominant, or minor undercurrents of the infrastructured present. The lecture will be followed by a discussion.

During the first listening session, instrument builders, composers, sonic researchers, and peripatetic musicians Mo'ong Santoso Pribadi (Takkak Takkak), and Billy Bultheel present tracks and soundscapes that operate as time-compressing experiences. Each merges ancient, contemporary, and invented instruments and sounds distantly and presently familiar. Bultheel describes his music as an ongoing attempt at synesthesia, conjuring various time and feeling codes over a sonic arc. His work merges performance, choreography, and invention with references from chamber music to noise to techno. Mo'ong Santoso Pribadi’s compositions operate on surprising, beautifully jarring juxtapositions of traditional, classical, and vernacular sounds, inventing a dynamic of both temporal and spatial compression and sound that is, to suggest a genre of its own: melodic-chaotic. The session will be followed by a discussion with the artists.

Rachael Rakes is a researcher, writer, curator, and educator. Recently, Rakes was the artistic director of the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, THIS, TOO, IS A MAP; curator of public practice at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht; and head curator and programmer at De Appel, Amsterdam. With artist Bo Wang, she is researching the representation of globalised ghosts as a 2024–2025 UnDo Fellow. She has also initiated an embodied artists’ writing project awarded by Mondriaan Fund and Amsterdam Funds for the Arts, 2025. Rakes is a selection committee member of the New York Film Festival and Porto Post Doc; a member of the collective Counter-Encounters with artists Laura Huertas Millán and Onyeka Igwe; and with Xenia Benivolski organises the project VESSELS – positioning musical instruments as material witnesses. Among other publications, Rakes is editor of Toward the Not-Yet (MIT Press, 2022) and Practice Space (NAME, 2020). She is a core tutor in the Artificial Times Department at Sandberg Instituut, and lectures in Film and Photographic Studies at Leiden University.

Xenia Benivolski is a writer, curator, and educator working with visual and sound art, material culture, and musicology, with a focus on musical instruments. She writes about art and music, contributing regularly to The Wire and Frieze. From 2021 to 2023, she organised the digital program You Can’t Trust Music (YCTM) at e-flux, where she commissioned texts, works, and performances by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nicolas Jaar, and Steve Reich, among others. In 2022, she co-directed the residency The Weapon of Theory as a Conference of the Birds with Ayesha Hameed, Suzanne Kite, and Jota Mombaça at the Banff Centre for the Arts; and with Rachael Rakes she organises the project VESSELS – positioning musical instruments as material witnesses. Benivolski was a fellow at the National Gallery of Canada in 2024 to survey the colonial impact of public musical instruments, carillons, and bell towers. She is a PhD student and FWO fellow at the LUCA School of Arts, KU Leuven in Brussels, where she studies the links between materials, iconographies, and ideologies in the context of organology.