Random Slop and Thoughtful Noise – NRU Workshop

8-11 Oct., 2026

Together with the crew from Noise Research Union, we’re hosting a multi-day workshop series at the Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre (BOARC) between 8-11 Oct., 2026 – Prenton, UK.

The Noise Research Union (NRU) are back to SSTRAPP and they’re bigger and better. The whole union will be there at BOARC, including: Martina Raponi, Sonia de Jager, Mattin, Cecile Malaspina, Miguel Prado, Inigo Wilkins, and our new core member Patricia Reed. Co-facilitating together with them will of course as always be the wonderful synth nerd Maeve Devine aka @Quieting___ ethereal techno witch and DIY hardcore punk veteran.

This workshop will focus on the relation between attention and noise, covering a great many ways this can be conceived, from the entropic distraction machines of social media and AI slop to the forms of exclusionary sociality that organise what we consider as irrelevance or interference. Amidst this 24/7-nonstop-ultraconnected-endless-hyperexposure we want to investigate the critical use of noise as a force for the possible ethical-aesthetic resistance, disruption and transformation of the social infrastructures and norms that support and maintain this capture and exploitation of attention.

To foster consciousness of noise, not just sonically but socially and politically, is to defy the pull of distractive attractors and fly free from the restrictive regulation of focus. Neurodiverse revolutionaries and allies against perceptual normativity, let us together foment a revolt against metastasizing brainrot and the maintenance of power through the attentional organisation of significance!We propose to begin with a four-day ‘strike’ against the distraction economy: this means we reject oppressive working conditions of constant digital delirium and we resist demands for the drudgery of focused concentration alike. Together we will empty the slop bucket, pack away the doom scrolls, and get on with the serious business of careful and deliberate noise. [text prepared by Inigo Wilkins]