MAKING SPEECH WITH INVISIBLE PARTNERS
Online Performance Installation in Mozilla Hubs (2020)““We and our technology are not natural as yet!” – Bertolt Brecht “Lindbergh’s Flight”
Link to the Virtual Performance Installation here
A Radiophonic Event
This immersive installation in VR reframes the technooptimism underlying “Lindbergh`s Flight” by questioning the assumption that someone could own airwaves. It invites the audience to listen to a broadcast - sent from the future. This work unpacks ideas of control and regulation of airwaves, and calls for a charter for ‘freeing air’ from the policing and symbolic order of the public domain, while ironically placing itself in the vaccum of a virtual space. This project is an artistic response to the curatorial proposition based on Bertolt Brecht’s radio play “Lindbergh’s Flight”.
Excerpt from the VR Radio Broadcast:
”Do We Breathe the Same Air? At some point in our history, Air became distributed unequally across the world - some cities, some people, some individuals, had more air than others did. Some air was more amplified than other air. Some air was lighter, some too heavy to bear. Some air was more ancient, more pure somehow. The air that was trapped in glaciers was the oldest, and when glaciers melted away, the trapped air in them emitted the sounds and voices of the ancient rhythms frozen inside them, preserved and halted for thousands of years, released in that very instant of the glacier melting, the air popping like a bubble, and releasing an air capsule in the waves of a future time.
There is no Air without Democracy, no democracy without Air. Sometime in the 20th century, governments occupied airwaves and declared it public property, controlling it with regulation and licensing. To control air waves is to control speech, to control speech is to control expression. Airwaves became an unquestionable asset of nations, which constricted air within borders, like packing empty vessels with air that cannot escape the volume of its confinement. Air became public property, and this way, it was taken away from the public in its name. This broadcast is about the absolute right to airwaves. Air has been under siege, air has to be freed. This broadcast is dedicated to life in the Aero-sphere, to air that is free. I report to you as a “student of the air”
Created, Written & Spoken by Amitesh Grover | Duration: 15 minutes | Language: English | Sound Design: Suvani Suri
As part of Exhibition ‘Look, Here Is Your Machine’ | Curated by Kai Tuchmann and Anuja Ghosalkar | Technical Design: Aliasger Dhariwala & Gavati Wad | Audience: 25 avatars per viewing only | Venue: Mozilla Hubs | Commissioned by SAF for SA Virtual
