Category: VISITING PRACTITIONERS

Tatsuya Takahashi was born in 1982 in Shizuoka, Japan. At 6 months old his family moved to Frankfurt, and at 2 years old they moved to London where they settled. Tatsuya speaks a lot about wanting control in his life, he found control through technology. At 13 he began building speakers in his garage, he then started to branch out into broader electronics, pulling apart keyboards and making simple oscillators. Tatsuya attended Cambridge university and studied general engineering, structural engineering, thermal dynamics, electrical information sciences and control theory. Shifting his interests from playing back sounds to generating sounds, Tatsuya did a masters in analogue electronics, which set him on his career building analogue synthesisers.

Takahashi believed that synthesisers should be everywhere. In the same way someone can bring an acoustic guitar to a park and play a song, people should be able to be mobile with synthesisers. After university Tatsuya set his eyes on working for a synthesiser company, he had an abundance of knowledge on building synthesisers, but little knowledge on the industry. Being of Japanese heritage, he settled on Korg which was founded and based in Japan. In 2006 he moved to Japan and started working for the company. His first project was the microKORG XL, this synthesiser was already in production when he joined and so he had little control over the project. His input was slightly limited as the product was a digital synth, but it was still a valuable experience as it was his first experience working high speed electronics and his first time making a mass producible product. To summarise this experience, Tatsuya says ‘it was very educational but not very creative for me’. He managed to have more control over his second project, the KORG Monotron. It was the first analogue synth Korg released since the 1980’s, it was a very simple compact machine. The most important aspect of this experience was the transition from one off devices to producing tens of thousands of them. This experience shifted Tatsuya’s focus to think more about how he could make music making more accessible to people. Tatsuya created the Volca in later years, this was the definitive expression of this idea.

A collaboration with Apex Twin on the Korg monologue triggered a desire in Takahashi to pursue more interesting projects outside of Korg. In 2017 he left the company and moved to Cologne, he then joined a brand agency with a goal to work with more artists. The company was Yadastar, it was a brand agency for red bull producing redbull academy works. Through this he was able to work with artists that he admired, one of which was Ryoji Ikeda. They collaborated on an instrument, they made a hundred of them and performed a piece. Tatsuya really enjoyed this process, it was a middle ground between mass produced products and one off products. The piece was only performed once, and tatsuya appreciated this self destructive process, creating a piece of hardware and using it only once. They gathered one hundred car enthusiasts with large sound systems, and gave them each one of these devices tatsuya had designed. Ikeda composed a piece designed for this medium called ‘A for one hundred cars’ which explored different versions of the note A through history, the slight variations in frequencies. The result was a massive drone piece composed of 100 versions of the note A weaving in and out of each other, this was played through the cars sound systems in LA. Another project tatsuya did with Yadastar for RBMA was the ‘Granular Convolver’. This was a device that combined granular synthesis with convolution, convolution being the process of combining two signals together in terms of frequency. This was not mass produced, it was for a project where the device was given to a number of participants to create with. Tatsuya found it very interesting to watch how these artists would use his device, some manipulating field recording, some combining instruments with samples. This project provided Tatsuya with a desire to create mass producible products again, it just so happened to be that red bull sacked the agency shortly after this forcing him to make the change. Takahashi then went back to Korg to open their factory in Berlin, he now works with a small team creating musical equipment.

What I take from this talk is that it is important to love the work that you do, that is the best way to have an influence on the world.

‘Altruism is the most rational form of selfishness’

– Jaques Attali

‘selfishness is the most rational form of altruism’

-Tatsuya Takahashi

Jana Winderen is an artist based in Norway. Her work focuses on hard to access audio environments and creatures, both locationally and in terms of frequency ranges. Her work is displayed as site specific and spacial audio, installations and concerts.

Jana has worked with many different aspects of sound, but she focused mainly on her work with water in this talk. In 2016 Jana was invited to join a project called dark ecology that focused on the area between Norway and Russia. A group of artists and scientist investigated an area on the border, this particular space had a political weight at the time due to complications with the north east passage and the oil industry. Jana recorded local people’s stories, people who are directly effected by the conflict. Jana also recorded the ocean with hydrophones to sonically capture the area. She talks about the use of hydrophones and how one has to be patient and a-tune to that form of listening, it can be that you don’t hear anything at first but in time you start to hear more, ‘without any exceptions, I always hear something that is triggering my interest’ she says. Jana was invited to investigate the marginal ice zone, it was an exhibition to catalogue small aquatic creature populations and the change in ice formations. Jana talks about the difficulties she faced due to the ships noise, and that she had to get away from the ship on land. She then faced difficulty due to a drone some scientists were using to record seal populations. Her work requires isolation, she talks about how she has to get very far away from machinery or people. Jana talked about hearing a dropping tone in the water and working out its source because a seal poked its head out of the water shortly. I find the idea that she hears a great deal more than what is visible fascinating, hearing more but what you hear is less defined. In this talk Jana shows a series of images of her seemingly isolated, it looks about as far away as you can get to human influence, but it is not the case. She says you can still hear machinery even if you walk very far away, you would have to ski for a day to get away from it.

‘We have colonised all of the planet with our sound’

During a project in Newcastle following a river source to mouth, Jana became interested in listening to the health of a body of water. She saw fresh water biologists counting underwater insects to say something about the health of the body of water. Jana became interested in trying to identify the sounds of these underwater insects, with the goal of understanding which insects survive certain changes to the river over the years, she found that this method would be quite difficult to prove quantity. While working with these fresh water biologists, Winderen became enamoured by the worlds she found within small sections of rivers, speaking about the variety of creatures and the sounds they produce.

Jana Winderen emphasises the value of drawing a subject, believing it forces you to pay attention to what it looks like, ‘you get to know them better so when you then see them again, in my experience you recognise and see them and remember them.’ I think this could be a valuable practice to just to familiarise yourself with your auditory materials.

Jana reminisces about working in northumberland listening to an ants nest using hydrophones. She describes the movement/vibration of the ants nest as an incredible sound. She emphasises the importance of just trying things out, exploring the auditory world, whilst being mindful to not disrupt it.

Pedro Oliveira is a Brazilian researcher and artist, his work focuses on political use of sound and political violence. He considers himself a researcher, who’s research expresses itself through art. 

He began his talk by outlying three themes he feels are essential to his research and practice:

1). Material Conditions of listening- how sound becomes ‘sound’. How the body perceives frequencies as sonic and vibrational information. 

2). Listening as Relation- Not just grasping knowledge, to relate, to ‘give in and give on’ to the event. Who we are and where we are, and what informs the conditions of this encounter with the sound.

3). Legibility and detectability- What listening ‘produces’ about the body, meaning that sound is inherent to a ‘body’. Listening as an act produces the body. 

Germany adopting language/accent recognition software in immigration. 

The practice of using language/accent recognition in immigration originated in the 90’s, a recording would be made of someones accent, a team of people would then analyse the recordings to determine whether the individual was from the place that they claimed to be from. This is mostly used in cases of asylum seekers as there is often a lack of documentation. In 2017, Germany replaced the teams of linguists with software. An individual would enter a room, speak into a microphone for two minutes and the software would return the probabilities of the persons geographical origins. Pedro Oliveira found interest in the idea of machine listening revealing a truth about a person, external from their claims about themselves. He began researching this process, and collected all of the information he could. He investigated into how many times this software had been used in asylum cases, he found that in a single year the software was used almost 10,000 times. Pedro took a specific interest into the success rates of the software, as he found the idea of 10,000 people’s quality of life being decided by software very worrying. He points out the lack of accountability in this process, and the difficulty of contesting the results. Utilising a freedom of information act he found that the margin of error for this software was 20%, which means that out of these 10,000 cases almost 2,000 were probably wrong. 

Pedro was commissioned by the gutter institute in Brussels to do an art piece based on this piece of research. He analysed the paperwork that asylum seekers get when they arrive in Belgium, its a description of what they need to do, how they should behave and what will be done with the recordings of their voices if a dispute was made. Pedro then hired a semi professional choir, and had the leader of the choir select singers from Belgium with a migratory history. He then had them sing the documents written by the Belgium government in a slightly mocking way, like a machine was reading it stretching out syllables. An element of this piece was to highlight these people’s relationship with Belgium, as they identify as Belgians but Belgium doesn’t look at them the same way.

Robert Henke is a German composer who specialises in multichannel audiovisual works. His works utilise computer algorithms, generating sound and image, integrating field recordings, photography and light. His works can be described as ambient, contemporary or club music.

His latest work explores the grey area between engineering and artistic creation, and the relationship between the two. The work began with just one machine, a CBM 8032 computer, a now obsolete machine that holds sentimental value to Henke due him learning programming on it as a child. He wanted to see exactly what he could do with the equipment, gradually Henke added more computers and hardware until the project became a live performance utilising five computers and hardware he developed that allowed him to extend the machine’s utility. One of the things that interests Robert about this piece is that due to his restriction to obsolete technology, everything he does on stage could have been done in 1980. Furthermore, Henke appreciates the fact that the results he produces on stage probably would’ve been discarded as not interesting at that time. He believes the work, at least to him, highlights the change in the collective mind set of the art world, we can now appreciate works created from a piece of technology in the same way we appreciate works created from instruments. 

Henke speaks on the cultural significance of the commodore CBM 8032. The computer had the first affordable CPU, suddenly students in the 1970’s could build their own computers, this created a doorway for people to become computer developers. Another culturally significant part of these computers is the visual layout, green characters on a black background. Henke describes its aesthetic as ‘a future of the past’, and he speaks on how he likes that he carries this subtext with him on stage. One of the most important aspects the Henke is the minimalist nature of the machines, the screen is limited to 24×80 characters, giving what he describes as a limited scale with which to create something pleasing. Henke describes this as liberating. 

HIs piece utilises the computers monochromatic green aesthetic to provide a visual accompaniment, creating complex imagery with something that is simple in nature. Henke draws influence from Manfred Mohr and his work in computer art, he had a reduction in his creative process due to the limitations of the medium. This reduction, Henke believes, resulted in works that still remain fresh by todays standards. This kind of art has a unique challenge, creating something simple enough to work with a machine of low processing power, but complex enough to be aesthetically pleasing. I think finding freedom within limitation is very interesting and id like to experiment with this method of creation.

Kate Hopkins is an accomplished sound editor based in Bristol who has worked in all genres of TV and film. Due to Bristol being the home of the BBC’s natural history unit, she has specialised in sound for natural history films. Hopkins has been awarded 2 Emmys for outstanding editing for non-fiction programming, this was for work on Plant Earth ‘Pole to Pole’ (2007) and Frozen Planet ‘Ends Of the Earth’ (2012), she has also been awarded three BAFTAs. Kate has a long list of projects she has worked on, some of which are Disney’s ‘Monkey Kingdom’ (2015), National Geographic’s ‘Great Migrations’ (2010), Apple’s ‘The Elephant Queen’ (2018). More recently she has worked on David Attenborough’s ‘A life on our planet’ (2020) and Apple’s ‘Earth at night in colour’ (2020). 

Kate began her career as a receptionist for a small post production company in Bristol. Her boss Nigel, she says, was a picture editor, and while fulfilling her receptionist duties (making phone calls, answering emails and ‘making endless cups of tea’) she would also assist her boss in the cutting room organising trims from 16 and 35mm film. Hopkin’s believes that the small nature of the company allowed her to experience many different fields, working alongside Aardman animation studios, and syncing up picture and sound for dramas and natural history films. After 3 and a half years working in this company, Kate received her union card allowing her to transition to freelance work. 

At this time, there were a lot of 35mm drama’s being made in Bristol for large American companies such as Universal. Kate moved from Nigel’s practice to Universal and started working on these dramas as a freelance assistant editor, eventually moving into the role of assistant sound editor. Hopkins credits this moment as the birth of her passion for sound design, in her own words she ‘realised what impact a sound edit could have, if you put different atmospheres, if you put different effects in, they move on a story and add drama.’ Kate names some of her influences as the Cohen brother’s films, The godfather, Apocalypse now and Raging Bull. She says ‘these are all films which had very distinctive sound tracks’. ‘Raging Bull’, she adds, ‘was particularly good because all of the punches used a combination of real punches, but also had Lion roars and stuff put in. So it sort of illustrated how much you could do with sound design with it still feeling real. It was just adding power and drama.’ 

Kate began to learn about signature sounds used in dramas, for example if you wanted to portray poverty you would use distant dog barks and the sound of a baby crying, sudden silence being an excellent way to create drama. Eventually Kate would have to transition from film to digital as a freelancer, which meant no training, she remembers the process as very much ‘learning on the job’. At this time some of Kate’s colleagues from the past were setting up a production company named ‘Wounded Buffalo’, she began collaborating with these colleagues on natural history films such as ‘Natural world’. Continuing with the theme of learning on the job, Kate recalls accepting a job in Idaho (US) which was a 90 minute documentary about wool, the studio had protools which at the time, she had never been exposed to. Hopkins read the manual on the plane journey over, and thankfully produced the 90 minute soundtrack. 

Hopkins began work on ‘Blue Planet’, she says this was a fantastic job as the show being underwater allowed for many creative opportunities in the sound design. Hopkins recalls enjoying designing sound to emphasise movement of organisms, and also the feeling of depth by changing ambience. She believed this work pushed sound editing further forward in the production process, sound became more important and her work became more of a collaboration between sound design and music. From ‘Blue Planet’, Kate went on to work on ‘Frozen planet’, ‘Blue planet two’, ‘Life’, and ‘the dynasty series’. She was then asked to work on Disney’s ‘Nature’ series, mixing feature films for large theatres with her colleague Tim Owens. During this time Dolby atmos started arise, which Kate believes helps sound designers achieve their goal of placing the audience in the environment on screen. One thing Kate stresses the importance of in her work is using accurate sound, she says you can layer up as many sounds as you want but It will result in a muddy mix if the right sounds aren’t used. 

Hopkins describes working on horror films to be ‘an absolute joy’, due to the creative freedom. Using whatever sounds you like as long as it results in a scary sound. This contrasts heavily with the practices of natural history sound, where she is required to meticulously find specific animal calls and sounds. Kate fondly recalls working on a low budget horror films called ‘Hardware’ (1990), but states something that I think might stick with me ‘there’s nothing like a low budget film to put pressure on a sound editor.’ This really highlights the impact and importance of sound design, in the absence of high budget visuals its up to the sound to immerse the viewer. 

Hopkins describes how she starts the process of working on a film or tv program, specifically in natural history. She stresses the importance of recording wild sound onsite, and says this can often get overlooked as directors can often be focused purely on visuals. Kate remarks on a moment in her career where a project was allocated a small budget for sound editors to go out on location, which she describes as a rarity. She talks about being driven around the Maasai Mara in a jeep, recording Lions very close up and wildebeest hooves among other things. 

Kate describes the collaboration process between sound editors and composers, finding the balance between effects and music. This involves agreeing which scenes are going to be music drive and which are effects driven to avoid overlap and unnecessary work. They also have to work around each other to not overcrowd a mix, for example if there are a lot of bass heavy effects the composers have to avoid bass in the music. 

It was at this point in the lecture where Kate showed a Protools session for a clip about meerkats from the Dynasty series. Watching this I was struck by the amount of audio files and the organisation of them. I find the idea of sculpting a believable soundscape very interesting, specifically the subtlety of the mix, doing just enough to immerse the viewer but little enough so as not to distract from the scene. 

Joel Stern is an Australian researcher, curator and artist. His interest in sound came to him when he was a teenager listening to community based local radio stations, especially graveyard shifts, listening to long form minimal, avant-guard experimental music. He joined a media and technology course in Melbourne, where he collaborated with students, articulating ideas across the boundaries of different mediums. He felt at that time, something new was happening in the world of art, focusing on new technologies and techniques. He studied sound arts at London college of printing and began to see sound as an important genre of art. Stern feels this time was extremely formative for him, partly due to the improvised and experimental music scenes in London.

Stern took on the artistic direction of liquid architecture in 2013. It’s the key sonic arts organisation in Australia, it formed in the late 90s out of the interdisciplinary practice in the royal Melbourne institute of technology. At the time it was a national touring festival of sonic art. It had a Eurocentric, modernist experimental approach to sonic art with concert and exhibition as the key formats. 

When he took on the role he dissolved the festival format, he wanted to work on projects at any scale at any time, he wanted to be more ‘formally experimental’. By 2014/15, under his direction liquid architecture had become a year round venture consisting of all kinds of formats.

What would a Feminist methodology sound like? This is how Joel describes his curatorial methodology for sound, he puts emphasis on the politics and ethics of listening. Stern sees curating and curatorial research as a from of knowledge production, trying to map out a particular terrain. Joel’s aim was to cultivate a feminist culture within the organisation, to create a radically inclusive environment and set a template for liquid architecture for years to come. Stern thinks not in terms of singular events or projects but in terms of investigation into methodologies for sound production in a political space. 

Eavesdropping and machine listening was a research project for Joels PHD. It was fundamentally a collaboration with James Parker who had been thinking about sound through the prism of a critical legal perspective. For example, the ways in which law tries to regulate and control sound, and the way that societies and structures operate with it such as the weaponisation of sound. The word eavesdropping is relevant because of its history, it describes a crime or public wrong. Stern and Parker wanted to think about what the history of eavesdropping can tell us about the practice today. They hoped that researching the history of eavesdropping would illuminate how todays social political landscape is affected by it.

The Manus recording project is about a detention centre on Manus Island off the coast of Papua New Guinea that is controlled by the Australian government. This work was a collaboration between Michael Green, Andre Dao and Jon Tjhia. Michael was contacted by a prisoner detained in this centre through a phone he had smuggled in. Due to the intermittent internet connection, the prisoner would prerecord messages, these messages became the content of a podcast called the messenger. It’s a sonic representation of the prison population. Joel approached these artists and asked if they would create a piece for the eavesdropping project, this piece came to be called ‘How are you today?’ They smuggled 6 audio recorders into the detention centre with phones loaded with credit. This was to give the prisoners a means to record a ten minute recording and send it to Joel and his colleagues, they did this daily. They then created an exhibition where these recordings would be played. There is also an online bank of these recordings, they total 14 hours of speech. Some of the recordings ask us to listen to the men, and some ask us to listen with the men to their surrounding sounds. I find it interesting that they didn’t try to create a narrative, its more a documentary take, an unfiltered window into the experience of people who normally would not have a voice, not be listened to or with. The piece is a vessel for the audience to eavesdrop on something we are not meant to hear.

The main pieces of advice I took from Joel Stern’s lecture is think about how you can make audible, what was previously inaudible. When you make a piece about something, consider why you use sound, does it reveal something extra or communicate an account or idea in a way that couldn’t be done through another medium?

Darsha Hewitt is a Canadian sound artist that works primarily with technology, making artwork through experiments, pushing electronics to new uses. 

Hewitt takes inspiration from Dr Ursula Franklin, who suggested that technology should be seen as a comprehensive human led practice, similar to culture or democracy. Hewitt believes that Technology is connected through history to structures, networks of people and nature. We need to not only value the end product of technology, but the preceding steps and advancements that led to that point. This ‘end product’ view of technology, Hewitt says, leaves us unfamiliar with the material aspects of the infrastructure that upholds it. 

Hewitt places a lot of value on working with obsolete technology, this is partly influenced by the concept of post-growth. We live on a planet of finite resources, therefore populations and economies cannot grow infinitely. Post-growth is a term that acknowledges the eventuality that there will one day be a tipping point where economic growth will no longer be beneficial to humanity, after this point we will have to look for other indicators and techniques to increase human wellbeing. Hewitt is looking into ways to use technology that responds to this idea of post growth. Darsha thinks of obsolete technology as a naturally occurring resource, appearing in rubbish bins and sidewalks. This resource is a tool, to be experimented with, material to manipulate and reformat into art. 

An example of using obsolete technology for sound arts: 

Electrostatic Bell Choir- 

In 2013 Canada switched from analogue to digital cable. Due to a failure to inform the public that the switch could be achieved with a converter (there was no need to buy a new TV), a lot of people bought new televisions, thus there was an abundance of televisions on the streets. Hewitt used this new resource to create an art piece. Curious to see if she could use the static from the screen to move something, Hewitt started experimenting. She found that she could hang electrostatic bells from telephones in front of the screens, and they would respond to the screen’s electrostatic discharge, causing them to ring.  

After creating this piece, Hewitt found that in the 1700’s electrostatic bells had already been used in a similar way to demonstrate the potential of static electricity. Hewitt believes this is a first hand example of how ‘electronics are not only matter, unfolding through minerals, chemicals, bodies, soil, water, environments and temporalities. They also provide traces of the economic, cultural and political contexts in which they circulate.’ This practice of taking apart old technologies to understand and reformat the parts is called media archaeology. 

Hi fidelity wasteland 1: 100 year old quicksilver cloud-

Central to this piece is a 100 year old piece of technology called a Thyratron typically used in industrial AC switching mechanisms. This thyratron contained a vacuum tube radiating a cloud of ionised mercury. This piece of technology interested Darsha as it was built before the concept of planned obsolescence, it was a functioning piece of technology’s history, and due to the transparent construction the infrastructure is visible. Darsha recorded the high pitched tones the thyratron emanated, and with help from a musician composed an audio/visual piece that gives an experiential glimpse into history.

Darsha Hewitt became interested in the idea of spontaneous DIY sound performance, and created a poster detailing how to create a sound performance with two telephones called the ‘loop hole generator’. I like this as it makes sound performance completely accessible to anyone as most people have phones, I also like that it has a collaborative/communal aspect to it. The piece creates one time, unique and dissonant sound pieces where small patterns would sometimes emerge, the user could also input sound into the phones and listen to how the sound travels and changes through the feedback loop. Darsha noticed that the feedback sounded like a whimpering baby, this gave her the idea to mechanise this movement and create another slightly different sound piece. She attached strings and motors to lots of old baby monitors, she described them as looking quite small pathetic and noticed a sort of  anthropomorphisation happening. Darsha creates a mechanical system and lets it create its own patterns and sequences, and leaves it up to the listener to discern musicality from it. I’m interested in this idea not composing a piece of sound art, but composing the framework and context for a piece to grow and thrive within. This is very similar to Jessica Ekomane’s use of Max MSP to create parameters for a piece.

Researching Darsha Hewitt’s work and philosophy has given me an appreciation for the political-economic aspects of materials used in art, the value of obsolete technology as something to explore and reformat, and lastly the practice of creating the parameters for a performance or sound piece and letting it unfold organically.

Jessica Ekomane creates situations where sounds acts as a transformative element for space and audience through the interplay of psychoacoustics, perception of rhythm structures and the interchange of noise and melody. She explores the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics, and investigates listening expectations and their societal roots. 

Jessica believes that there is a ritualistic aspect to listening to or making music, and that there’s an opportunity for community within it. Jessica has an interest in rhythm because of its bodily quality, its universally felt, its democratic. She believes that audio can be a way to transmit a complex idea through bodily knowledge, audio is a way of sharing and understanding knowledge. 

Multivocal is an album consisting of two compositions. For the first composition, Solid of Revolution, Jessica created 13 different metronomes in Max MSP, they are all pulsating at 1 millisecond difference, each with a different note. This means that they start in uniform as one, but slowly, they start to faze into something different, the landscape is constantly changing. Ekomane states, ‘The piece is in a way always the same and always different’, this causes the audience’s perception of the piece to be less about waiting for the next event, and more about the process. Its about holding and releasing consciousness, if someone were to fall asleep or leave the room and come back, the piece would be the same but totally different. You don’t perceive the changes in the piece while you’re consciously listening to it, but if you leave the room for five minutes and come back then it will be completely different. Solid of revolution is played in quadraphonic and each note is played from one speaker. This makes the audience’s perception more spatial, it creates a melody in space. Its provoking trends through repetition that play with your bodily experience in the moment.

Jessica Is interested in the classic division of mind and body, she investigates this through trying to evoke thinking and feeling in her audience at the same time. 

I think holding and releasing consciousness is what you do when you create any sound piece, but this piece isolates and elucidates this aspect of sound arts for the audience. This piece has influenced me to be mindful of how I hold and release consciousness in my work. Hopefully through understanding this piece I can play with the idea of structuring works in layers, some that demand the audiences immediate conscious perception, and some that can drift in and out of the audience’s conscious perception. I think framing sound art in this way will help me understand my effect on my audience and how I communicate my ideas.

Comedown is a piece exhibited in the Berghain. Jessica took elements of club music that are usually used to induce euphoria and collective intensity, and reformatted this musical language to create the opposite effect, a piece that builds but never drops, a piece that wants to start but never quite builds the momentum. This, for Jessica, is reminiscent of the social landscape of 2020. This ironic take on club music is driven through use of samples that re-enforce themes of money making, predators, war and hustling. This almost sarcastic use of samples ‘reflects some aspects of the social and economic system we are in’. It is about a system that is breaking down. 

Citizen Band is a piece by Jessica made using a CB radio, a short distance communication radio, now mainly used by truck drivers. CB radio is completely public, anyone can tune in, and the conversations found can be very personal. Jessica tuned into American truckers having conversations and recorded them. She thought it would be interesting to dislocate this CB frequency to FM, national radio, where these conversations don’t really belong. Jessica values ‘placing one context into another’, and believes that ‘this can reveal certain hidden structures’. 

https://www.jessicaekomane.com/Citizen-Band

I like the idea of finding beauty/interest in a private or unassuming place. It reminds me of the candid humanist photography of Henri Cartier Bresson. The element of his work that I love is the unbiased, uninterrupted glimpses into human life. I feel as though Jessica Ekomane has achieved the same effect through audio.