Universal Language: Feedback Static is a one-day sequence of presentations, listening sessions, and conversations. Featuring artists, musicians, and researchers Ash Fure, DeForrest Brown, Jr., domingo castillo flores, Victoria Keddie, and with an introductory lecture by Rachael Rakes, this program focuses on sound’s spatial and bodily responsiveness and music’s non-linear social histories. By demonstrating sonic culture’s engagement with organic, material, ideological, and digital infrastructures, the presentations also encourage embodied, experiential, and subjective ways of understanding language, knowledge and communication that can recode our lives. 

A collaboration between Rewire and Stroom Den Haag, the event follows the programme trajectory Universal Language, which researches and remodels digital computation’s history, social life, and its many alternate models through art, science, and poetics. Guest curated by Rachael Rakes, Universal Language is conceived as a part of Stroom Den Haag’s multi-year initiative Networks of Embodiment, which explores how the body, ecology, and technology co-shape new forms of collective life. 

Ash Fure's somatic musical practice eschews conventional composition and notation in favour of sculpting and wielding sound in a visceral way. Fure’s live performances and built-out worlds mobilise the elemental force of sound, the social muscle of listening, and our animal capacity to sense. She performs at Rewire 2026 with her performance and sculptural soundwork Animal, inviting the audience to train their animalistic sensory faculties. Fure holds a PhD in music composition from Harvard University, and is associate professor of Sonic Arts at Dartmouth College.

DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Alabama-raised, ex-American rhythmanalyst, writer, musician, and curator based in Vancouver. His written works focus on a diagnostic exploration of electronic music through considerations of applied metaphilosophy. He has released three albums on Planet Mu that channel the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of techno-vernacular expression. Brown’s debut book Assembling a Black Counter Culture was released on Primary Information in 2022. 

domingo castillo flores is a poet, musician, and retired artist who collaborates often.

Victoria Keddie is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans sound, video, installation, performance, and research. Her practice investigates the architectures of communication – acoustic, spatial, and technological – and explores how gesture, noise, and interference shape human experience. She currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, leading the course Listening Beyond Hearing alongside a spatial sound studio she designed for the programme. She also directs the Spatial Sound Consortium in collaboration with Harvestworks, connecting studios internationally to develop new forms of access and collaboration.

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. Among other publications, Rakes is editor of Toward the Not-Yet (2022) and Practice Space (2020).