On CCA Grant Project Plans - "Fencing Laws"

Our original proposal, statement:

“For decades, loudspeakers have broadcasted K-Pop, folk tunes, messages of democracy in South Korea and of corruption in North Korea, across the border barrier of the demilitarized zone (DMZ). In this “psychological warfare”, sound becomes a tool by which various propaganda seek to coerce, regulate, and further divide communities. With walls, borders, and other territorial delineations often framed as physical, privileging the visual and material elements of landscapes, how might sound operate as, for, or against our fences?

Over the next half-year, Uncle Boy’s Landscaping (UBL) will develop an immersive sound installation for Fencing Laws, an exhibition in Tjaden Gallery. Using 8 speakers hidden inside mounds of earth, debris, structures, and other sculptures evocative of divided landscapes, UBL aims to ask how sound can act as or subvert the maintenance of these socially constructed lines. 

UBL looks to not just Korea’s DMZ, but to a larger history of military sound psy-ops and propaganda, the sounds of border crossings and enforcement, civil unrest and protest, and even how noise complaints and subsequent policing inform borders of gentrification.

For the installation, speakers will be integrated into large mounds of earth, grass, and rocks. Each mound will also support various structures and items such as chainlink fences, wall fragments, plants, lights, sign posts, and construction materials. Scattered between the mounds will be traces of pathways, landscaping equipment, construction barriers, propaganda leaflets, and the detritus of transnational movement.

Each sculpture’s soundtrack will consist of real, recreated, and reinterpreted recordings of military psyops, propaganda, music, and legal writing on borders. Alternating between speaker-sculptures, the tracks will also make use of personal writing, news excerpts, and tourist recordings from border sites. Each sculpture/soundtrack will act in conversation with one another, discussing these different notions of sound and border. The imagined movements and interactions delivered by the soundtrack will conduct visitors’ passage around and beyond barriers (of sound). Through this disorienting environment, viewers will come into dialogue with geographic divisions as “embodied” by sound.” 

(test sculpture for larger sound installation)

Testing Irene’s PureData scripts