three bedrooms in the east village
12 April 2022
a certain uncanniness sets in when showing your apartment. you are still living in your home, but you are showing prospective tenants the space which could become their home. an excruciating liminality sets in, swaddled in loss and longing.
at the time of showing my apartment, i’d been on a vaporwave kick. i set out to disorient potential tenants by playing vaporwave throughout the apartment, accompanied by static blasting radios. i placed a microphone on one side of the apartment, ran through a slight bit of delay, to both playback the vaporwave and to grasp at bits of conversation. as people milled about, i tracked a camera on the steps to my bedroom hole, protecting their exploration of my home onto the wall. few noticed that they were being surveilled, more intent on surveilling my home. by the end of the showing, it became clear that my goal of scaring would-be tenants off had failed as they found the vaporwave audio installation a charming expression of an artist’s life.
reflecting on my experiment, i decided to invert the vaporwave formula: as opposed to turning musak into unreal representations of mundane places, i took recordings from the showing and attempted to create an unreal representation of my very real home. throughout this recording, the voices of apartment hunters and the building manager dance around washed out vaporwave. distortion and delay create a space distinct from the one that i had spent so many days and nights inhabiting.
in the end, i needed to make the space uncanny in order to leave. the burden of leaving my home as it was weighed too heavy. so instead i melted into air.
Sounding Disorder in Police Riots
1 May 2021
Police rioting involves officers inciting violence against assembled groups. This project explores how police agitation transforms assemblies into riots through sound. The acoustemology of a police riot is conjured through police sound technologies. Following ethnomusicologist Steven Feld, acoustemology concerns how sound structures knowing, being, and experience. Within a police riot, dispersal orders played on a Long Range Amplification Device (LRAD)—a speaker system used to signal arrests—commands screamed over bullhorns, and unified chants across a police unit are strategic interventions in the soundscape to create disorder to justify police crackdown.
[ ... ]