“Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.”
André Malraux“Once exposed, a secret loses all its power.”
Ann Aguirre, Grimspace
I will perform a part of the art work “Legoland” at Dokumenta(13) (Kassel, Germany)
The performances are a part of the project: “Winning Hearts and Minds” >>> initiated by Critical Art Ensemble
26 July 12.00 (10.00 UTC) (see map below)
Concrete privacy in the public space
The work Legoland uses radio as its medium. Also the work focuses on various aspects of numbers and communication methods within clandestine operations such as number stations or secret intelligence services.
The audio material for the performance has been collected from various radio receivers around Europe, North America, and Asia.
Broadcasting secret messages into air is a peculiar activity, since it’s indeed shared in a public space. Hence everyone could in practice tune in the actual frequency and listen to it. However, there is only one kind of listener that could decrypt the message (for i.e. special number stations) due to a simple but efficient and unbreakable method using only a paper and a pen. The benefits of still using radio today has the advantage of the impossibility to trace the listener in contrast to the use of computers where everything has traces of IP numbers, logs and hard-drives. Radio waves are difficult to stop and in every moment of time waves are passing borders and through people.
The history of these broadcasts are to be traced back to the beginning of the radio medium itself making them the first public broadcast ever transmitted. The transmissions are unregistered and hence illegal to the FCC. Even though these type of transmissions had its peak in the cold war, they can still be heard. Some has changed its behaviour to digital mode (which still is made up of numbers).
audio teaser:
