Electroacoustic installation, conch shell, CD player (2004)
The Internet has surrounded American culture so completely that the digital network has, in a mere 18 years, become something that is now taken for granted. Another icon of American popular culture that illustrates how technology infiltrates our lives to the point where it becomes part of the fabric of our everyday existence is the Wachowskis’ Matrix film trilogy. In these movies, humanity has become enslaved to a machine empire in which humanity lives in an illusory virtual world and acts as power supplies for their machine masters.
When taken literally in context of this piece, the metaphor for the First World being enslaved to the Net is far too strong, but perhaps a poetic statement can be made for a society that is increasingly dependent on digital networks from the Internet to cellular technology, and now wireless networks like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. To draw a parallel from the title of the classic Philip K. Dick story title, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, what will the inhabitants of the digital culture dream of as emerging media technologies become more universal in our everyday lives?
My metaphor from this is to draw a parallel from the Matrix to a common childhood experience, when adults tell the child when they are listening to the pink noise created from ambient sound resonating inside a large shell such as a conch, that they are hearing the sound of the sea. Therefore, in the world of The Matrix, would a person holding a shell to their ear hear the sea, or the resonances of the data and information that is the barely perceptible background noise, lying just below the threshold of our consciousness?
For this electroacoustic work, a large conch shell is used as a resonator for two small speaker elements which play an original sound work located on the attached CD player. In the sound composition, three elements interplay to represent the underlying fabric of digital existence. The first is an instrumental song created on the fly from data obtained from the Internet that was translated in such a way as to create a musical score. The second, discernable as a low-pitched screech, is the actual program data for the game,
