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The fourth annual Alchemy Lecture brought together four “Alchemists”—thinkers and practitioners working across disciplines and geographies—to share a constellation of ideas for the future. Their urgent, poignant, and inventive lectures compose Sound—at the Interregnum, which asks what sounds we make and what sounds we should leave behind in a world on the cusp of becoming something else. At the interregnum, we meet oligarchs and fascists, ongoing genocides and displacements, deepening anti-intellectualism, the use of sonic weapons (Long Range Acoustic Devices), the complicit silences of mainstream media, and the refusal by those who have taken power to make a world in which everyone’s needs are met. Their sounds of avarice, capital accumulation, and immiseration do not enter the world uncontested. There are also the sounds of protest, of anthems, of chants and keening, noise of all kinds, blue notes, ghost notes, high notes—which also take us over as vibration, energy, atmosphere, and breath itself. The acclaimed thinkers, fiction writers, poets, and musicians who are in these pages have produced, reproduced, blown out, and made something counter to the sounds of the world at this interregnum—this period of great danger, and also great possibility.

Is there an autonomous republic of art that transcends time and place?

Canadian writer Madeleine Thien reflects on a fragment of a mural depicting Three Uighur Princes from one of the Bezeklik Caves along the Northern Silk Road, in what is now the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China. This most renowned donor portrait of Uighur-Buddhist art was brought to the Berlin museums following the Second German Turfan Expedition (1904–5). Thien responds to its vibrant colors and expressive lines with a literary text, transporting us into the daily lives of the painters who adorned the caves with strikingly lifelike murals in the tenth century.