DJ-Set - 10 PM KS Room

Lain Iwakura

Lain Iwakura is a rhythmanalyst, sound and performance artist, writer, and activist based in Graz. Her work moves at the intersection of sonic experimentation, critical theory, and social activism, engaging with questions of time, rhythm, and the politics of perception.

She studied musicology, sociology, and philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt and is cur- rently pursuing a master's degree in computer music at the University of Music and Perform- ing Arts Graz. Her research explores “Social Noise,” examining the intersections of sound, power, and collective experience. Simultaneously, as a scholarship student at The New Centre for Research and Practice, she is writing a thesis on “inhuman fictioning,” investigating the role of myth and speculative narratives in reshaping identity and agency.

Until recently, she co-ran the influential music labels Force Inc. and Mille Plateaux, as well as the theory platform NON, alongside their original founder Achim Szepanski († September 22, 2024), whose legacy she now carries forward. In Graz, she is deeply embedded in the experimental sound community: co-founding the collective O, working with the Institute for Sonic Welfare on spatial audio installations and concerts, curating for the music team at Forum Stadtpark, and co-founding the awareness group awaGraz. She was also a founding member of the student-led collective CMKK(Computermusik & Klangkunst).

Her artistic and theoretical inquiries revolve around polychronicity, the non-philosophy of time and rhythm, and the notion of Uchronia as an escape from imposed temporalities. In this vein, she developed ATC – Against the Clock, an exhibition in collaboration with Jeronimo Voss. Through her Social Noise performances, she probes the fragile boundaries between social composition, vulnerability, and the limitations of subjectivation.

Currently, she is working on a project that links sonic fiction with auto-theory, exploring its potential as a mytho-scientific practice of fictionalizing—writing oneself into the world from the perspective of the dehumanized. This research also interrogates the irreality of cis-gender, considering it in relation to a fundamental, all-encompassing transsexuality.