Un vif silence

Soundscape, mp3 audio file / Environnement sonore, fichier audio mp3.

Propaganda promulgates itself into the minds of those exposed to it through insidious means. Like a pop song on the radio, ceaselessly repeated to eventually form a familiar pattern in the mind and eventually becoming palatable to even the most critical listener, these messages become what we don’t know that we know[1]. These “innate” judgements might even masquerade as critically thought out. I have been over the past several years interested in these forms of infiltration, and the ways in which these percepts can alter our brainwaves, and thus our moods and state of mind. In the 1970s, NASA experimented with sound tonalities to see how they might, by tuning brainwaves, even induce sleep, or hallucination. I’ve worked with binaural beats to alter visual perception in past works, but in the context of the Language and Propaganda project I became interested in the political implications of the subliminal. The repetition, addition and eventual cacophony of such messages propagated by social and big media eventually turns into noise which can no longer be consciously deciphered without great pains. As static noise is categorized into different colors and my work generally deals with the visible spectrum, I created a soundscape of this noise, going through the color spectrum, and crescendoing into successive layers until it too becomes neutral, negated by the mind, as the listener drifts off into daydream or sleep and the subliminal can grow.

[1] Žižek, Slavoj, “Philosophy, the “unknown knowns”, and the public use of reason”, in Topoi, vol. 25, no. 1–2 (2006): 137–42.