MEGAPHONE: The New Wireless
An extension of my ongoing performance project "The Satellites Are Dust, the Phone Lines Are Down, the Postal Service Is Bankrupt" (a post-apocalyptic romance of sorts), I propose erecting a telephone pole crowned with a great, big billowing windsock in any windswept location. Viewers are welcome to climb the pole to reach the megaphone (aka windsock) and speak or listen into the gusty winds – both giving and receiving, public exposure and solitary act. Communicating via the wind, we engage the Space of Flows. Our society is constructed around flows of capital, flows of technology, flows of organizational interaction, flows of images, sounds and symbols. Flows are not just one element of social organization; they are the expression of processes dominating our economic, political, and symbolic life. Megaphone employs atmospheric flows, acknowledging the air as a churning, global substance we all share and shape. Wind can symbolically liberate voice from the fixed technological trajectories of the panoptic/panaural stronghold. So, let us rethink the notion of the "power lines" that connect us on this earth. Utility poles serve as the wired nodes of our information superhighways. However in Megaphone, the usual tangle of cables is replaced by a simple windsock – an elegant and delightfully impractical wireless communication alternative.
MEGAPHONE: The New Wireless
An extension of my ongoing performance project "The Satellites Are Dust, the Phone Lines Are Down, the Postal Service Is Bankrupt" (a post-apocalyptic romance of sorts), I propose erecting a telephone pole crowned with a great, big billowing windsock in any windswept location. Viewers are welcome to climb the pole to reach the megaphone (aka windsock) and speak or listen into the gusty winds – both giving and receiving, public exposure and solitary act. Communicating via the wind, we engage the Space of Flows. Our society is constructed around flows of capital, flows of technology, flows of organizational interaction, flows of images, sounds and symbols. Flows are not just one element of social organization; they are the expression of processes dominating our economic, political, and symbolic life. Megaphone employs atmospheric flows, acknowledging the air as a churning, global substance we all share and shape. Wind can symbolically liberate voice from the fixed technological trajectories of the panoptic/panaural stronghold. So, let us rethink the notion of the "power lines" that connect us on this earth. Utility poles serve as the wired nodes of our information superhighways. However in Megaphone, the usual tangle of cables is replaced by a simple windsock – an elegant and delightfully impractical wireless communication alternative.