Anticipating the symposium The RING: On Instrumental Time with discourse and listening events on 4 and 5 April, writers and curators Rachael Rakes and Xenia Benivolski introduce the ancient and enduring relationship of clocks and instruments, and music and time. Artists that will be joining the symposium are Merche Blasco, Billy Bultheel, Nyokabi Kariũki, Juliette Lizotte, and Mo'ong Santoso Pribadi (of Takkak Takkak).
The invention of the drum machine likely dates at least as far back as the twelfth century, credited to Islamic Golden Age polymath Ismail al-Jazari.[1] His Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices illustrates an automated robotic percussion band that is mechanised by the movements of a simple clock. The Drummer’s Clock, one of his many mechanical and musical inventions, operated on the principles of the water clock – a method which uses the controlled inflow and outflow of liquid to accumulate volumetric time increments, and has been employed across civilisations since at least the sixteenth century BC. Like the cuckoo clocks that were fixtures of twelfth-century European houses – their ritual sounds imprinted in the memory of generations – the performance of the drummers would take place on the hour, announcing the time with a bizarre imitation of a bird.
The sonic alarm clock dates at least as far back to Plato – the infamous philosophical enemy of sleep – who designed a mechanism that used the pressure of rising water to whistle at dawn, an ancient ancestor to the ringtones, pendulum clicks, mechanical pianos, and calls to prayer that continue to infiltrate our consciousness. Then, the elemental entanglement of sound and time, it could be argued, has been present from the first civilisations. Just as the sun’s placement in the sky indicates the passing of the day, the rhymes of nature, the songs and sounds of animals and creatures, and our own heartbeats are time too. The keeping of time, whether in measured incremental forms, season marking, or deeper geologic and ancestral perspectives, has innately been tied to music and instrumentation.
It’s often said that music depends on time, but it is also time’s tormentor. If clocks impose order, music defies it: warping, stretching, and breaking time through rhythm, improvisation, and shifting durations. Next to his many musical clocks, al-Jazari also invented several devices he called “perpetual flutes,” which operated to self-generate its single pitch whistle as long as its source of water continued. Going further back, Greek Aeolian devices only required wind and a material for friction to keep making music. Then, isn’t wind also a kind of time? A presence without a visible source, it marks the passing of moments, shaping landscapes, bending trees, carving stone. Sound, like wind, or time, is acousmatic: invisible, powerful, and utterly material.
But the history of the clock, employed as a social ordering device, is also the history of resistance to the clock, and the history of instrumentation has always been a history of refusal. If the earliest Roman sundials were frequently smashed by those who resented their regulation of daily life, musical instruments have also challenged imposed structures. While the clock regulates labour and free time – disrupting spontaneous flows of movement, ideas, and exchange, often with a stirring bell or chime – standards for theories of classical or virtuoso instrumentation and performance impose an order of taste and hierarchy of sound. Considering the ringing of the bell-tower, calling indentured and enslaved workers back to the fields, the combination of clocks and amplified sound has often been a disruptor of mental and physical autonomy. Resistance to it has often come in the form of music: the tresillo or catarete beats that pulse across continents, drawing rhythmic maps of the dispersed and dispossessed from the Atlantic slave trade. Instruments are inevitably and powerfully tied to land and land-bound life – to their materials, their resonances, and the tensions they hold with labour-time, which seeks to keep capital on the heels of life itself. Even as modernity’s metronomes and atomically precise satellites grid onto unseen infrastructures of global accumulation, the heartbeat and tides keep their own tempo.
Everything starts with the land, I remember again and again.
Everything starts with the land, so how did this get lost.[2]
By engaging with temporality through musical instruments we encourage a generative plurality of form and meaning: a consideration of the instrumental collective as a growing ecology and as an index of evolving metaphorical and functional appendages, identities, genders, portals, and relations that partake in a polyphonic environment. To play an instrument is to activate a history, an inheritance, a system of relations that stretches far beyond the individual player. This mini-symposium brings together artists and practitioners whose works speak to these landscapes and emerge from them, whose instruments are things with “thing-power” that have the ability to forge unexpected sonic connections between musicological, social, and political discourses. It creates a space where sound and instruments are examined as figures of testimony – witnesses to time, place, and histories.
The RING is organised by VESSELS (Xenia Benivolski and Rachael Rakes) as one of several research events exploring the intersection of musicality, musical instruments, timekeeping, ecology, and labour. Spanning experiential and discursive propositions, this edition at Rewire joins many of those in chorus today who seek to disrupt the material continuum that propels time towards its inevitable demise. Bridging practical and theoretical approaches to sound, we have invited artists and musicians who engage with ecological and territorial resonances of instruments – the ring and its echo – invoking the looping nature of time and history. The project gestures towards a collective of humans, animals, plants, objects, sounds, and things, in shared resonance in and with the world.
The RING is not only a conversation about instruments but a practice of listening, a space for sound to reveal what time attempts to erase. It highlights sonic artists who also resist imposed rhythms in ingenious ways, whether by attuning to echoes from times past or by merging sounds across space and history. Through this we might hear new possibilities emerging: alternative chronologies, insurgent durations, and autonomous rhythms.
The symposium of discourse and listening events will take place on Friday 4 April and Saturday 5 April at The Grey Space in the Middle. 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.
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 programme 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.
[1] Al-Jazari is also likely the first person to schematise the analogue programmable computer, in the twelfth century. Al-Jazari, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (Kitab fi Ma'rifat al-Hiyal al-Handasiyya), translated and edited by Donald R. Hill (Dordrecht: Springer, 1974).
[2] Susan Raffo, “The Language of the Land,” Dark Mountain, January 26, 2024, https://dark-mountain.net/the-language-of-the-land/.
Image: One of al-Jazari's perpetual flutes: the fountain with two tipping buckets, scanned from Topkapi manuscript, 1206; from Al-Jazari, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (Kitab fi Ma'rifat al-Hiyal al-Handasiyya), translated and edited by Donald R. Hill (Dordrecht: Springer, 1974).