This project, in collaboration with artist/anthropologist Daniel R. Small, was commissioned as part of York Chang’s 2019 solo exhibition To Be Wrong with Infinite Precision, presented at the Orange County Museum of Art.
Radio Booth operates simultaneously as an archive, a stage, and a sculpture. The booth draws a proposed line between the structural origins of 1980’s political talk radio, the charged subcultures of social media, and media’s pervasive effects on culture and politics. The booth is a repository of the ephemera of certain marked belief systems and epistemological tendencies which undergird and fuel these subcultures. The materials contained within conflate media eras into a continuum of magical thinking, mythology, folklore, symbology, religion, astrology, conspiracies, and coincidence. It is a space where belief is not only used to fill gaps of comprehension and knowledge, but where belief is routinely weaponized to mobilize populations for maximum disruptive effect.
In the age of digital media and podcasts, radio booths as physical sites verge towards obsolescence, but in this context, the booth seeks to exist in multiple time frames as an analog for the current condition of all media, not just radio, researching an incomplete index of developments in other related phenomenon, including memetic warfare and other social media constructs. When compared with their technological precursors, these constructs amplify and sharpen, exponentially, the cultural trend of media segmentation, cognitive bias, and social tribalism first established by talk radio. Through performative recording sessions which mix factual presentations and interviews with fictional reenactments, music, and noise, these performances articulate a form of provisional empiricism to explore the intimacy and operation of belief. Live sound design and score performed by Marcus Herse.
Session 1 Recording: I am Sitting in a Feedback Loop
Session 2 Recording: The Map is the Territory
Session 3 Recording: Out of Thin Air
