In the wider context of research on digital death, the arts have an important role to play. Digital traces of life and death are communicated through visual and aural forms that are informed by arts and design practices, both within and beyond “commodity aesthetics” (Waug, 1990). How We Are (Un)Becoming is an arts-research project that investigates the digital soundscapes of liminal spaces, what Saskia Sassen calls “systemic edges,” that map sounds of death-making by economic, social, and bio-spheric expulsions (Sassen, 2014). The project was initiated by Dr. Dalida María Benfield and Christopher Bratton of the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR) as part of the CHANSE-funded Digital Death project, led by Prof. Johanna Sumiala.
The death investigated here is not only the end of physical life of living beings, both human and other than human, but also, the end, or disintegration, of nation-state citizenship, belonging, place, and care. The importance of these spaces is articulated by Sassen, who writes that these are: “…conceptually subterranean conditions that need to be brought above ground. They are potentially new spaces for making new local economies, new histories, and new forms of membership.” How We Are (Un)Becoming is an investigation into the possibility of framing, experiencing, and critically investigating these spaces through live sounds being generated by the very systems that are producing these conditions; asking questions about how and why can they be, and why could they not be, accessed; and how to sufficiently make them audible, attentive to the context of the listener, with respect to their affective reception and active co-production of meaning.
The project has taken different forms of multi-modal research, including a series of reading/listening/viewing groups and discussions; online listening sessions; field recordings; and a sound installation curated and designed by the authors. The first installation was exhibited during the Digital Death conference held in Helsinki over three days in October of 2024. In this, its first experimental iteration, the sound installation included our own sound piece, along with contributions created by international artist-researchers Ou Ning (China/US), Joseph Kamaru/KMRU (Kenya/Germany), and Ali Akbar Mehta (India/Finland). In this blog, we will reflect on all of the works included; the process of creation of our sound piece, Lily Pads, that was part of the installation; and the overall experience of “sounding” that we created in the architecture of the historic Athena building, where the conference was held at the University of Helsinki, October 3-5, 2024.
The installation at the Athena building was a sonic landscape that permeated the passageway spaces of the conference. Because of the unique existing staircase and sitting rooms outside the conference meeting rooms, we installed speakers in the stairwell. This created an invisible sonic landscape that echoed throughout the liminal spaces of the conference. This strategy echoes the “systemic edge” of spaces of migration, camps, and conflict. As we watched the researchers in attendance move through the stairwell, we often saw them pause, look out the window, searching to find the source of the sometimes soothing but more often jarring sounds of other places, conversations, and events. The conversations that we had with several of the conference goers attested to their sense of an expanded field of inquiry and an invitation to another way of thinking about digital death.
Sound art pieces by Ou Ning and KMRU made up the first day’s sonic landscape. Ou Ning is a curator, filmmaker, and writer. His interests include working with “ordinary people,” as seen in the seminal film San Yuan Li, co-directed by Cao Fei, which documented a small village persisting amid the skyscrapers of Guangzhou, China. They worked collaboratively with 12 other artists to document the everyday lives of the villagers and the many different levels of the built environment during an overwhelming wave of urbanization. He has also created, as a curator, extensive sound installations and exhibitions, and is credited with being one of the first writers and publishers to document the underground music and cultural scene emerging in China, beginning in the late 1980’s. The sense of investigating submerged social narratives, stories of people and places that are yet to be articulated and heard, marks his field recordings. His projects over the past five years include actively working with small groups of people to organize themselves as teams of field recorders, documenting the spaces of cities, villages, and rural areas in China. The sonic landscape that echoed throughout the space on day one included Ou Ning’s project, Audible Tire, which was created during the CAD+SR residency in Tire, Turkey, in March of 2024. Tire is an ancient city that is a crossroads of cultures, markets, and conflict zones. Ou Ning’s recordings evoke the depth of the historical resonances of the place, while also giving a sense of being there; invoking a feeling of transnational togetherness through digital sonic connection, across time and place. This sense of commemoration echoes with our analysis of digital sound being an especially evocative method of being with, remembrance of, and mourning.
Along with Ou Ning’s soundtrack, KMRU’s Temporary Stored was played during the first day. KMRU (Joseph Kamaru) is a Kenyan sound artist, based in Berlin, whose work has been fundamentally committed to understanding the sound of things – material and immaterial – through field recordings and archival excavation. Temporary Stored is focused on the liberation and revitalization of sounds of musical/rhythmic performances by people in conditions of colonial extraction in Africa. Through his sampling and remixing of these sounds, rescued from the archive, he imbues them with new meanings and ancestral respect. Writing about his practice in this work, he states: “Listening, too, is constructed around a Western scope of thought, narrowing the extent of what different listenings could produce and posit. Approaching a more pluralistic listening, I propose a Black listening approach, an auditory imagining through Blackness. Listening that seeks to engage with contemporary and socio-political cries through Black sonic thought, which a Black listening perspective could proffer a deeper view and dispositions of Other listening practices.”
On the final day of the conference, the installation consisted of the soundtrack from the digital artwork, Purgatory EDIT, and the accompanying online archive, Doomscroll Archive, created by Ali Akbar Mehta and a team of programmers and researchers. It is a compendium of cinematic images of war and violence, condensing the digital archive of doom of the 20th century, while referencing the seemingly endless past, ongoing, and future, histories of global warfare.
On the second day of the installation, the soundscape consisted of a sound artwork created by us, Chris Bratton and Dalida María Benfield, entitled Lily Pads. In the following section, we narrate, in a non-linear and iterative form, the different approaches and media that informed Lily Pads, which echoed throughout the space on day two of the installation. These included soundscapes of military communications; surveillance cameras; crowdsourced (public domain or creative commons) field recordings; historical archives; and live news, both mainstream and independent.
A Google Earth image, a desert, apparently, the outlines of structures, maybe a town, but too regular, a camp, maybe, some kind of military installation. The caption: Agadez, 2019. It is in Niger, but not Agadez the city; “Agadez” is a marker for that place outside its limits by some distance–Air Base 201, the “American base.” Not the French base, or the other European encampments in service to ending the passage of migrants north, Air Base 201 was somewhere between the permanence of the one and the narrow utility of the other. To return to the image, the logic of the photo captures the logic of the subject itself. The base appears small, miniaturized. It is apart from, but also part of; a fragment that implies connections to other like fragments, however obscured. Invisibility is a form, and in fact, few Nigeriens and fewer Americans knew American troops were in the country until four were killed in an ambush along with four of their Nigerien colleagues. It was an eruption of violence that momentarily made visible the relations and scale of a web stretching not only over Niger and Africa, but everywhere.
The Base was built near to an ancient trade route, where empires met, still meet, and still trade, people, drugs, extracting value from whatever might be found or created. A pick-up truck forces a van off the road, a subcontractor whose driver and security are left standing by the roadside, stripped of what was the equivalent of 40,000 USD cash intended to pay those locals who worked for the Base. It is less than a mile to the front gate. The fenced perimeter can be seen from the stalled van, but it might as well be a world away. Borders between here and a distant place, not to be crossed, marked as closed.
Who inhabits this nonplace, Air Base 201, a ruin before the fact? “Plastic human,” Achille Mbembe’s term (2019); digitally constituted subjects; dead time, waiting, contiguities that once an order is issued, respond via their screens. The machines hum to life, move purposefully to the runway, then they are off. Now the operators wait, and this place they are confined to, because they are in fact confined unable to leave 201 except on flights to distant elsewheres for leave, no contact with the immediate outside, they wait. There is a gym with various machines used in endless repetitions, one or another of them is always there, no matter the time. They have connectivity, although a little dicey, given the memory demands of the game systems they bring with them, an essential appliance for the long hours spent outside their assigned tasks, They are players in digitally animated stories that are analogues of the digital deaths they enable. Also, the food is generally bad. As one reddit post states regarding the base: “Bring your own cereal.”
It began and was justified as preventative surveillance drones; necessary for security. The people who did know of the American presence in Agadez didn’t buy this as the true purpose of 201. Nigeriens were dying, victims of raids by the so-called Islamist terrorist, then, as later, so where was the security? 201 quickly revealed itself to be a staging ground for the hunt for “jihadists.” What can’t be seen, however, is heard, a buzzing overhead. A serene landscape, a cloudless sky, a distant speck, barely visible flying too high to see: an autonomous weapons system that searches via AI, then kills its “target profile.” A drone.
Air Base 201 was abandoned when the political tide shifted, the result of a coup staged by the very army officers who had been trained by the US. It was a “gut punch,” said one American officer, a comment that overlooked the fact that any foreign military presence, but particularly the US, is a wound of still suppurating colonialism.
With these various sound art works, we, as artists, researchers, and cultural organizers, are attempting to create a place to experience the “subterranean;” those places that are not accessible, but which are essential to understanding digital death in the context of global conditions of warfare and state violence. This expansion of the frame of research on digital death raises many new potential research questions. Approached critically, these investigations may give us the opportunity to re-position ourselves in relation to these conditions. While each work creates a different experience of sound, implying different potential forms of sociality, each equally asked the listener to pause and reflect on their relationship to the, at turns, documentary and/or abstract recordings, work to identify them, and gauge their distance or proximity to the presence and absence of what is evoked by the soundscapes. As we continue with the project, we look forward to future iterations that could further expand the contributions, the space and mechanisms of amplification, and to more in-depth discussions with the listeners to further create the potential for both research and social engagement.
References:
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Trans. Steve Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.