An environment saturated with hum. Surprise in the unfolding of sonic layers. Stepping into ‘unstream’ unmasks the invisible structures in the digital enterprise of predicting and satisfying our emotional needs when listening to music. The data shadows that follow when making choices to save or skip become permanent arbiters in content circulation, a constant commodification of perceived habit that then forces creators to pursue all avenues of digital commodification. Being tracked and followed isn’t easily felt, especially when the eventual engine of computing such data is disguised as a friend who understands exactly what tear-jerker to feed to you when you need it. Unstream is both a phenomena of tangible radio waves, made decipherable with our own hands in tuning and fine-tuning its form, similar to the instrumentarian’s use of tuning our actions, our deepest emotions. With the use of radios as discovery channels, you feel more connected, more wrapped by these waveforms that have palpable effect on our consumption choices. With your own reversed data double feeding into the radio orchestra, you’re encountered with careful unbundling and rebundling of collective listening practices. The echo and feedback make it transparent that individual listening is not isolated and the compounded layers of sound give a powerful undertone to the economies of attention. In using the radio as a signal processor and analog demodulator/modulator, you become implicated in its design, its purported use.  As the participatory exhibit suggested. what other models of unfolding emotion can occur with smaller, ‘felt’ modes of discovery?

 

unstream (?)

whizzing radio waves

careful unbundling and rebundling of our listening practices

…uncertain source…

indiscernible sounds yet uncanny effect

redesigning our listening choices and consumptive power