Deal, Jordan. “The Magical Slickness of the Myth of Black Oil, Movement Suite.” Openwork, 2025, doi.org/10.52214/ow.v2i1.12701. 

We’re excited to announce the release of the second issue of openwork Journal, a peer-reviewed publication at Columbia’s Computer Music Center that publishes research into experimental music, art and scholarship. Interdisciplinary in scope, the journal promotes new modes of interaction between scholars and practitioners whose work critically re-listens, through and across, boundaries and constraints. Openwork is one of the Columbia Libraries’ student journal partners, and the editorial board includes graduate students from the Computer Music Center and artists/collaborators from all over the world,.

Adapted from the inaugural Openwork quarterly newsletter:

For Openwork’s newest issue, Editors collected artwork and articles exploring the concepts of ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’, works which critically engage with the established and overlooked boundaries of these temporal markers and reimagine conventional histories, materialities, and subjectivities. The contributions engage with themes including musical memory, the Global South, temporalities of performance, narratives of pre-/-post digital, and the Anthropocene. 

Navigating temporal relations, sonic works form complex networks where practice-based traditions, auditory capacities, sociocultural contexts, technological developments, and psychologies intersect and shape meanings. They also allow the anachronistic and synchronous to coalesce, creating temporalities that challenge the sequential understanding of time. In Issue #2, Editors asked how such sonic affordances can be harnessed to problematize and interrogate temporalities, materialities and subjectivities.

This new issue includes an introduction from issue editors Iain Findlay-Walsh, Katelyn Rose King, Sepehr Pirasteh, Ayşegül Kuntman, and Jim Igor Kallenberg; articles by Leahley Alawi, Ruari Paterson-Achenbach and Sophie Marie Niang, Iain Findlay-Walsh and Tristan Partridge, Louis-Michel Tougas, and Soundcamp cooperative, Sasha Baraitser Smith Mortimer Drew, and Grant Smith; artwork by Gray, Victoria Keddie, and Jordan Deal; a video by Gauri Bahuguna; and poetry by Winnie W. C. Lai.

Read, listen, and watch more.