Art in General Production Notes

Tag: AUDiNT

August 2, 2011

Andrew Hultkrans on “Sleeper Cells” at Art in General …

by artproductionnotes


WHEN SUN TZU WROTE The Art of War in the sixth century BC, he probably wasn’t thinking of artists, let alone Toby Heys and Lisi Raskin, the two artists who delivered presentations on the weaponization of culture on Tuesday night at Art in General. He was, however, advising his readers to exhaust every strategy short of physical combat to defeat their enemies, and that, Heys and Raskin showed, is the aspect of war for which art and culture have been conscripted to play a part, particularly since the dawn of communications technology and electronic media. Sponsored by Triple Canopy, this (literally) small talk felt like a slightly rambling but often engaging tour through the audiovisual scrapbooks of two mildly paranoid obsessives. Being a mildly paranoid obsessive myself—one who, like these artists, is fascinated by music, deception, intelligence work, and the cold war—this was fine by me. I did find myself occasionally wondering what others were getting out of it.

After a brief introduction by Triple Canopy deputy editor Molly Kleiman, Heys, a British sound artist, began his talk. He announced that he was going to play twelve sound clips from a laptop, each an example of audio designed to deceive, dispirit, or terrorize. Though he promised something from the 1930s to start, the familiar descending bass slide of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” came on instead. An early instance of sonic deception? No, a glitch. (Oddly, for two artists so focused on technology, this was a recurring theme throughout the evening.) Cueing up the intended clip, Heys said that the innocuous Guy Lombardo–style big-band tune was by Ben Selvin & His Orchestra. Selvin, a hyperprolific bandleader and producer, holds the Guinness Book world record for most recorded sides in music history. He was also, more to Heys’s point, an early program director for the nascent Muzak corporation in the ’30s. Muzak is generally thought of as annoying but harmless elevator music, but, as Heys noted, it has been deployed strategically since its inception on factory workers (as Taylorist “audio anesthesia” that would mask the grimness of their surroundings and make them work harder) and on shoppers (to lull them into a consumerist trance).

Next, Heys played a clip of the Ghost Army, a WWII cadre of artists (including Ellsworth Kelly), set designers, sound engineers, and the like, who were enlisted to mimic or exaggerate US forces in the field, fooling the Nazis with live mixes of sound-effect records of armored vehicles, munitions, explosions, etc. These multi-turntable mixmasters were the “original battle DJs,” Heys quipped. He followed this with the eerie, psychedelic “wandering soul” tapes from the Vietnam War. Over an Acid Test collage of severely Echoplexed musique concrète, a mournful female voice told her countrymen in Vietnamese that she was trapped in limbo between life and death because she had died far from her home village. A CIA psy-ops project inspired by Vietnamese folk superstition, the “wandering soul” tapes played a part in Denis Johnson’s novel Tree of Smoke and have a distinctly Apocalypse Now vibe. With several clips of music, including “These Boots” and the Barney theme, used to force those under siege to surrender (Koresh in Waco, Noriega in Panama) or to elicit confessions from detainees (Guantanamo Bay), Heys theorized that the key element of such “touchless torture” is repetition, the rate of which has been increasing in music culture ever since the invention of the radio. (The sampled loops of golden-age rap might have bolstered this point, though he didn’t mention it. Adorno had something to say about this as well.)

Raskin began her PowerPoint presentation with a slide of the Greenbrier fallout shelter in West Virginia, a massive, real-life Strangelovian facility that was intended to house Congress in the event of a nuclear holocaust. Known for installations inspired by cold-war military and intelligence culture, Raskin (like Heys), seemed to be sharing the source material for her work. She ran a long, hilariously retrofuturist AT&T ad from the early ’80s about their spanking new fiber optic network, the promise of which seemed to be that it would make routine interoffice communications look as whiz-bang as an episode of The A-Team. She spoke about ARPANET, the cold-war Defense Department network, connected by fiber optics, which slowly mutated into today’s Internet. Over a still of Michael Caine sitting in front of an early computer bank, from Billion Dollar Brain (1967), Raskin free-associated about Honeywell, a long-standing conglomerate that, like General Electric, makes everything from mundane household products (thermostats) to military supercomputers to napalm. To emphasize the horrors of the last, she played an infamous news clip of burned Vietnamese children fleeing a misdirected napalm attack.

During the Q&A, both artists spoke about the repurposing of culture for warlike ends and how some artists and their appropriated works can slowly be returned to the cultural realm without blemish. Raskin noted that Hugo Boss once designed uniforms for the Nazi brownshirts and that Donald Rumsfeld’s “logic” (“known unknowns,” etc.) sounded like Deleuze. Heys asserted that modern communication technology abnegates personal responsibility and provides cover for malign or negligent corporations. The connotations of commodities are effaced by time, they agreed, and hence it’s hard for anyone or anything to remain “outside” this process. Strangely, two middle-aged women in the audience challenged the artists on their perceived pacifism, one saying the use of cultural material as weaponry can sometimes be justified because war itself is necessary; the other maintaining that a pacifist stance “opens one up to risk.” Well, yeah. So does being born. I knew the Mama Grizzlies were out there in the heartland; I didn’t expect them to be near Canal Street in a small gallery with a bunch of liberal-academic cultural elites. Maybe they were part of a psy-op… or perhaps they’d just been temporarily repurposed.

Original post here:  http://artforum.com/diary/id=28679

Leave a comment
June 18, 2011

New Commissions Artist Steve Goodman (AUDiNT) interviewed on NPR.

by artproductionnotes

On June 14th, the day after their panel discussion, The Martial Arts of Sonic Hauntology, at Eyebeam, and right before debuting their New Commissions project Dead Record Office at Art in General, NPR’s All Things Considered caught up with AUDiNT‘s Steve Goodman to talk about the exhibition, sonic warfare, and the politics of frequency. Listen to the story or read our repost below.

AUDiNT on All Things Considered

Bad Vibrations: Investigation Sound As Terror

By Sami Yenigun

I first heard of Steve Goodman as the head of Hyperdub, a London-based record label that has released work by avant-garde electronic artists like Burial, Joker and The Bug. But Goodman isn’t your average label executive. He’s a scholar, a lecturer at the University of East London and a musician who goes by the name Kode9. His new album, Black Sun, features rumbling bass lines under lyrics about a toxic world where a radioactive event has laid the land to waste. Goodman is also a DJ, and the time he has spent in the clubs of London during the last decade helped spark the global dance genre known as dubstep. But Goodman’s interest in sound extends beyond the dance floor.

“From being a DJ and playing on various good and bad sound systems, I’m very aware of the fact that sound — and music — doesn’t always create enjoyment and pleasure,” Goodman says. “Actually, sound has a very special power of creating irritation and bad vibes.”

As a scholar, Goodman studies the potential for music and sound to repel or harm listeners. On Friday, as part of a collective called AUDiNT (short for Audio Intelligence), Goodman will open an exhibition at Art In General in New York City called the Dead Record Office, which looks at various military uses of sound.

I met Goodman in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where he told me that he thinks of his work as a musician and his work as a scholar as being separate from one another but admits that elements from one inform the other. In 2009, MIT Press published his book Sonic Warfare.

“We look at everything, in the book, from the military using acoustic weaponry to the way sound is used in branding and advertising, to the way intense sound is used by various music cultures around the world to build collectivity,” Goodman explains.

His work with AUDiNT looks at the way sound has been used to aid destruction. The group takes the detailed historical research of his scholarly work and dresses it as art. The Dead Record Office exhibition offers a peek into the group’s work.

“What we’re doing is tracing or mapping these three phases of the history of acoustic weaponry,” Goodman says. “Firstly, starting with the Second World War, there was a division of the U.S. Army that was referred to as the Ghost Army. Part of what they were involved in was sonic deception, putting loud speakers in the battlefield to create a false impression. So we trace this from the Second World War to the U.S. Army in Vietnam, a division of psychological operations called Wandering Soul. This involved helicopter-mounted loudspeakers playing simulated Buddhist chants, fabricated sounds of the dead ancestors of the Viet Cong fighters speaking to them from the afterlife to try and persuade them to surrender.”

The third phase is less psychological, looking at a sound’s potential to be a more conventional weapon.

“What’s starting to emerge now,” Goodman says, “is the use of these ultrasound driven directional audio speakers.” These speakers can actually rupture eardrums from a distance.

Despite such advances in sonic technology, the old psychological tactics are still being used. Toby Heys, a fellow researcher at AUDiNT, says the U.S. military’s use of sound with prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has been well-documented.

“A lot of the detainees who were interviewed after their detainment have spoken about sonic torture as being the worst,” Heys says. “Rather than the sexual humiliation, rather than the beatings, the worst thing that they went through was the sonic torture.”

Nina Kraus, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University who studies the human auditory system, explains how sound triggers responses like fear in the human brain.

“We know that our auditory system has direct connections to our limbic system, which modulates emotions such as fear that will strengthen these neural circuits,” Kraus says. She adds that those connections are unique to each individual, so no two people will hear a sound in exactly the same way. “You know, because of the experience that a person has had throughout their lives using sound, now when any sound occurs — and in this case emotionally salient sounds — then the nervous system will respond in a way that will particularly enhance the information bearing elements of the sound.”

For a child raised in an urban environment, the sound of an ice cream truck might trigger a desire for sweets, while those who have never been around a vendor on wheels may find the looping melodies an annoyance. Heys says that the U.S. troops have employed an exaggerated version of this idea in Afghanistan.

“Before they embark in conflict they cleanse the area, but it’s like this cultural cleansing,” Heys says. “They’re playing heavy metal music, they’re playing rap music, they’re playing country music.”

Depending on your cultural experiences, the booming bass lines of Kode9′s music may sound either threatening or inviting. But as Goodman says, that’s exactly what interests him about sound.

“There’s a political dimension to sound and music that people often ignore that I call in the first book the politics of frequency,” he explains. “The way certain frequencies change the way you feel the way they resonate with different parts of your body, tapping into physiological and psychological dimensions of your experience. I’m looking to open up that other dimension, to get people thinking about music and sonic culture.”

People often celebrate the healing power of music; it can distract us and put us at ease. But Goodman’s work demonstrates that music can be something more than just a pleasantry, and that it’s worth trying to understand the full scope of its power, even if it hurts.

Leave a comment
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.