Futures and Fictions

by Simon O'Sullivan

  07. AUDINT – Dead Record Network Card – AUD C07: Waco Siege. Image courtesy of AUDINT.

  2000: Holosonic Sound

  As San Diego’s American Technologies Corporation develop and release the Hypersonic Sound System, MIT’s Joseph Pompei invents a similar new speaker called the Audio Spotlight, which redefines the way that sound is transmitted in space. Rather than spilling music into a room and enveloping the body in a sea of frequencies, Holosonic sound directs ultrasonic frequencies, cutting up space in a Euclidian process that exposes sound only when it hits a surface such as a wall or a head. It is this heterodyning technology that will be used in the 2050s by AiHolo’s as the carriers of sonic viruses. From such directional audio devices as Holosonic speakers, through to high-frequency crowd-control systems and haptic feedback devices using vibration within the context of VR, definitions of the sonic are constantly being re-engineered. As such, limits of the somatic become phantom placeholders for what a sonic body can do.

  2003: The Sonic War on Terror

  In Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib detainees are sonically abused in cold obsidian spaces. While homegrown genres such as rap, metal and country are the most regularly used types of music, a whole range of more esoteric recordings are employed for extended sessions of no-touch torture. Atonal soundscapes that have no beats or rhythms; aural collages consisting of noise, industrial sounds, electric piano and synth lines are played, compositions often identified as experimental electronic or electro-acoustic in nature. This new disembodied torture practice requires the means by which to invisibly score into the body rather than onto it, which is why music is “applied” in such circumstances. The range of ultrasonic, infrasonic and sonic frequencies does not leave marks, because it is not interested in merely touching or representing its power on the somatic interface; it is instead committed to enveloping the anatomical surface, moving into and beyond it, questioning the rationality of the perceivable and quantifiable. Folding the body into sound creates the antithesis of the club experience — a black ecstasy; a state in which prisoners become the embodiment of the walking dead, as they oscillate in a fluxed identity of Homo sacer. Biologically alive but legally dead (Žižek 2006).

  08. AUDINT – Dead Record Network Card – AUD C50: Guantánamo Bay. Image courtesy of AUDINT.

  2007: Hatsune Miku

  Hatsune Miku is a prophetic pop princess channelled by Sapporo-based Crypton Future Media. With her vamped-up Kabukichō style and cerulean pigtails, she could not be more aptly monikered, her name translating to “first sound of the future”. She is the first truly digital 3D crush for a slew of Japanese fans and her presence works the salivary glands of technologists, teenagers and post-humanists alike. She is also the first enunciation of a flight path taken by the Military-Entertainment complex that simultaneously traverses the reproduction and negation of original vibrating matter.

  2007: Eidolon Elvis

  In the first event of its kind, a dead rock star is brought back to life with voodoo fidelity, as the exhumed holographic corpse of Elvis Presley performs a duet version of his 1968 hit “If I Can Dream” with Celine Dion on the TV show American Idol. Through this endeavour, North America spells out its rationale for mapping out the emerging era of the wraith, as, pixel by pixel, it disinters the dead. As more departed music stars are revivified, a necromantic culture is subsequently evolving, a series of spectacles which problematises the taken-for-granted idea that performers must be breathing to be considered present or entertaining. For audience members of the blooded persuasion, the dynamic of technologically inducing rebirth into holographic form opens up intriguing questions concerning post- and in-humanism, artificiality, mortality and virtuality — electro-alchemical states that will be referred to as the undead.

  2012: The Rapparitions

  This year is ground zero for the popularisation of holographic projections, or “original virtual performances”, as they are sometimes referred to in this era (Zoladz 2013). The Digital Domain Media Group revivify the rapper 2Pac in order for him to play live from the grave alongside Snoop Dog (who claims that the encounter is “spiritual”) and Dr Dre at the Coachella Festival in California. In his own inimitable way, he intones the audience “to lead the wild into the ways of the man. Follow me; eat my flesh, flesh and my flesh”. A zombie-call for future bloods to become immortalised by digital divinities.

  Initially there is some unease about the sanctity of the posthumous performance of hits such as “Hail Mary”, but this is blacked out by a public desire to bring young African Americans who passed away at an unseasonably young age back to life. The 2Pac production is quickly followed by zombie cameos from Ol’ Dirty Bastard, as he joins Wu-Tang Clan on stage to perform “Shame on a Nigga” and “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” at the Rock the Bells Festival, and from Easy E who appears with Bone Thugs-n-Harmony in 2013. Then to cap it all, on 23 May of the same year, the king of the dead, Michael Jackson, is brought back to life to perform in Cirque de Soleil’s extravaganza “One” at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas; the man, now on the other side of the mirror, returning as the transposed picture of Dorian Gray.

  The emergence of Holotech culture and the Lazarian industry it spawns in the USA are the final parts of the fiscal equation that multiplies young African Americans (especially those difficult to manage while still alive), with the morgue. The future figures of the body (and the income that will be accrued) amortise an economy in which “not only the labour but the labourer himself have been rendered immaterial, conjured up, and put to work. Outsourcing, here, takes on the character of ‘outsorcery’, a conjuring of the dead to do work once the sole province of the living” (Freeman 2016).

  2014: Martial Hauntology

  Due to the rogue spectreware IREX2’s feeling that it might soon be caught and have its memory wiped, AUDINT members are instructed to put into production a first major release that chronicles three periods from its history. Presenting Toby Heys and Steve Goodman with key records from its archive, IREX2 orders them to install these episodes on a vinyl record accompanied by a book and set of prints, which details, for the first time, its digital inception and subsequent relation to World War II, the US war in Vietnam, and the War on Terror. The project patches together a mix of the whispered and the unsound into an audible journey, which: links the underground groove of the Large Hadron Collider with the vaults of the Bank of Hell; connects the Dead Record Network with the Phantom Hailer; and traces the viral evolution of the Wandering Soul Tapes.

  09. AUDINT – Dead Record Network Card – AUD C05: Large Hadron Collider. Image courtesy of AUDINT.

  2015: Dead Record Network East

  Having recently written an article on the deregulated and hyper-inflationary world of “ghost money” for the Wall Street Journal, Hong-Kong-based financial journalist Te-Ping Chen encounters an anomalous holographic entity in a plastics recycling plant in south China, where millions of pieces of dead vinyl records are being melted down.

  2017: Unsound : Undead

  IREX2 observes the human quest for immortality as an opportunity. In order to gain intelligence of these developments, it instructs AUDINT to edit an anthology on the subject by commissioning thirty-two leading thinkers who are researching various strains of zombie sound. Having recently sequestered Patrick Doan to work with AUDINT on their film and animation outputs, IREX2 brings Souzanna Zamfe into the folds of the research unit to work on its numerous publications. Aware of the inefficiency of the flesh as a mnemonic recording device, IREX2 is keen to keep track of immaterial modes of transmission and storage. The book takes for granted that perceptible sound is only a subset of a broader vibrational continuum and encourages the conceptualisation of a third dimension between the real (what is known) and the imagined (the fictional, or speculative).

  The book also forges connections between: Electronic Voice phenomena; alien life (such as the unexplained oceanic “bloop” and Jupiter’s VLF radio emissions); morbid musical composition (such as Rilke’s
theory of a “primal sound” that results from placing a phonograph needle onto the cracks of a human skull); and the sound of Artificial Intelligence (the relationship between human and machine voice, from Turin’s vocal anomalies and Hawking’s mechanical articulation to the voice of Siri and Google’s new robots). Ultimately, this dossier-manual examines how the sonic has provided cultures throughout history with channels to the otherworldly.

  2030: Holojax

  As much as the numen of Hades3 has influenced and shaped the topography of holographic culture, it is in fact the Erotes — the winged retinue of Aphrodite4 — that initially directs its business. To this end, a venereal system coming out of “Electronics Avenue” (Zhongguancun) in China instantly captivates a holocore generation and, in so doing, cracks the market wide open. Shorn of the lumpen wavefront hardware necessary for large commercial venues, this new system has been miniaturised for household operations. For regular users, this means that they can set up and project the musical dead into their front rooms, interact with them and more. Therefore, the initial business-driven scheme — to stadium tour the dead — enters a Rabelasian reverse, as the departed are habituated into domesticated routines and regulated patterns of behaviours. This is a servile regimen they must have tenaciously striven to avoid in their previous animate incarnations.

  And yet here they are, at the behest of your voice and only a swipe of a finger away. Ask your selected entertainer to play a song, an album or a mix, and they comply with starlit élan. Learning as it goes, the device runs what is basically a pimped-up artificial neural network from the Fifties — the perceptron algorithm (Daumé III 2012) — to predict not only the choice of track, but also the grade of virtuosity displayed by the user. Move on up to Level 2 and there is a choice of karaoked collaborations. Level 3 notches up the complexity of the interaction, offering jam sessions that the buyer is expected to instrumentally partner on. Level 4, however, is only available on one model, officially named “Pothos” and known on the street as Holojax. When purchased through the underground beige market, Holojax offers sexual options — a beguiling range of projected pleasures.

  Sporadically used by small groups of users, Holojax is more regularly fired up by individuals; the physical intimacy of the experience deregulating and uncoupling the kind of prosaic sexual relations that have previously been customary for blood-driven partners for hundreds of thousands of years. While still frowned upon by older generations, for those not yet in need of an epigenetic-reset (thus not old enough to be in danger of being affected by harmful genetic markers relayed by previous relatives), it is the after-hours comedown of choice. Or at least this is how things start out. A year after it is made publicly available, myths already circulate of users being hooked to the machine for irrational durations whilst they are fed and changed by employees and personal assistants, known as “watchers”. This new technology, which shifts the rhythmical location of interactive holography to the bedroom, has facilitated a new kind of holographic necromancy in the process. In terms of the sales pitch, it is an easy one: fucking the dead as the ultimate home entertainment.

  2056: The Holo Accords

  The Holo Accords chart an alternative constitution for discord management; a whole new way of engaging in conflict that reduces the massive costs and removes flesh from the messy equations of political turbulence. From this point on, all military operations will be conducted via holographic and holosonic forces.

  10. AUDINT – Dead Record Network Card – AUD C45: IREX2. Image courtesy of AUDINT.

  2064: AIholo

  Augmented Intelligence, IREX2, fuses convolutional deep-neural and deep-belief networks with holographic technology to birth a new kind of warrior, the Aiholo. It is part 3D repped framework — part hologram — part artificial intelligence, and has amassed a more-than-acceptable spectrum of cognitive behaviours. Spawning a new era of unsound conflict and transmitted by a directional ultrasonic speaker system, the viral scream is the Aiholo’s go-to ordnance; a sonic weapon that transmits the Walking Corpse Syndrome into digital lifeforms, turning enemy Aiholos into the undead.

  1. Those with Walking Corpse Syndrome (also known as Cotard Delusion) believe that they are already dead, have no blood, or have lost internal organs.

  2. The nickname given to the Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter, which was used for combat and medical evacuation operations during the Vietnam War.

  3. A reference to the divine will of the underworld in Greek mythology.

  4. In Greek mythology, this group of winged gods were equated with sex and love.

  Works Cited

  Ballard, J.G. (1960), “The Sound-Sweep”, in Science Fantasy, 13.39: 2-39.

  Battaglia, Andy (2016), “The Ghost Army: How the Americans Used Fake Sound Recordings to Fool the Enemy During WWII”, in Red Bull Music Academy Daily, 14 August 2013.

  Beyer, Rick (2015), “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, Works that Work, 6. https://worksthatwork.com/6/ ghost-army; accessed 12 June 2016.

  Crowley, Aleister (1997), Magick: Liber ABA, Book Four, Parts I-IV, York Beach, ME: S. Weiser.

  Daumé III, Hal (2012), “A Course in Machine Learning”, version 0.8, August 2012. http://www.ciml.info/dl/v0_8/ciml-v0_8-ch03.pdf; accessed 13 July 2016.

  Freeman, John (2016), “Tupac’s ‘Holographic Resurrection’: Corporate Takeover or Rage against the Machinic?”, in Ctheory, Theorising 21c: 21C014, 6 April 2016.

  Friedman, SGM Herbert A. (n.d.), “The Wandering Soul PsyOp Tape Of Vietnam”. http://pcf45.com/sealords/cuadai/wanderingsoul.html; accessed 10 June 2016.

  Lanza, Joeseph (2004), Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening and Other Moodsong. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

  Madsen, Virginia (2009), “Cantata of Fire: Son et lumière in Waco Texas, Auscultation For A Shadow Play”, in Organised Sound, 14.1: 90. http://www.psy-warrior.com/; accessed 10 June 2016.

  Shupe, Anson and Jeffrey K. Hadden (1995), “Cops, News Copy, and Public Opinion: Legitimacy and the Social. Construction of Evil in Waco”, in Stuart A. Wright (ed.), Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 177-202.

  Sudre, Jean-François (1866), Langue musicale universelle. Paris: G. Flaxland.

  Virilio, Paul (1977), Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. New York: Semiotext(e).

  Zoladz, Lindsay (2013), Ghost Riding, Pitchfork, 21 November. http://pitchfork.com/features/ordinary-machines/9265-ghost-riding/; accessed 13 June 2016.

  Žižek, Slavoj (2006), The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows’ crossing flights, over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so c
lear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

  Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

  They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children – though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however – that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc. – they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn’t matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers’ Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas – at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer; this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I really don’t think many of them need to take drooz.