So, this is my first foray into sound art, apart from audio I’ve designed for live performance pieces. It’s the first production project for my ‘Radio Narratives’ class at The New School, a three-minute sonic collage created almost entirely from appropriated materials, mostly soundtracks from military training and educational films, and follows the guidelines for the Third Coast Festival Short Docs Challenge. I’ve included a brief statement of intent below, but my suggestion is to listen to the piece before reading, if you choose to read it at all.
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Statement of Intent:
The piece was actually inspired by a Brecht quote about “an inescapable profusion and confusion in the tower of Babel.” I thought that “I didn’t know that” would be a good starting point for an exploration of state-controlled “truths” with the title phrase representing the public’s naive willingness to accept what we now recognize as mistruth and propaganda. I wanted the tension between time periods to emphasize how relativistic these messages are, depending on when we hear them – hopefully the mixing of periods emphasized the relationship between contemporary and dated material.
I originally titled the piece ” I Didn’t Know That: A Triptych” because I tried to create three distinct sections. The first is the monologue of media controlled messages, the second is a dialogue between the messages. The third section actually begins with Brecht himself reading a poem in his native German entitled “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake”, which, in translation, begins:
Truly, I live in dark times!
An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead
Points to insensitivity. He who laughs
Has not yet received
The terrible news.
Layered on top of this is the voice of McLuhan discussing his idea of “resonance” – nonlinear, nonlogical comprehension of sounds and images. These are the 2 voice of “authenticity” that are eventually buried by the familiar voices introduced in the first two parts, which are layered over them to create a cacophony that is (hopefully) a sum greater than its parts. Anyway, I removed the subtitle since it didn’t strictly fit within the Third Coast guidelines and I’m sort of glad I did, as I felt it opened the piece up to a greater breadth of interpretation.
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