Human loudspeakers-Living radios
Living Audio Player is a part of my larger project Human Loudspeakers whose topic idea is to use human beings as a source of sounds through polyphonic coordination realized via audio headphones: the voice primarily, then the body and, perhaps, sonic objects used to expand these main two.
In today's listening chain, the latest device for listening to music is almost always the loudspeaker (including the human being as a resonator of the built-in headphones).
Even live acoustic music almost always uses electric amplification.
From this consideration springs out the idea to invert the direction of the flow in order to have as the last step of this communication chain a Human Loudspeaker.
Living radios
Human Loudspeakers: Living Radios is a collective performance that uses a portable radio receiver, headphones, and human beings.
People, wearing headphones/earphones connected to their portable radio (or cell phone/mp3 player with radio receiver) tuned to the same radio channel, walk around trying to “play” the radio program by means of their voice, body, and objects used as musical instruments. Anyone with a radio and head-ear/phones can tune in to the same channel by adding themselves to the chorus of human speakers. After a while, a sort of coordination, especially in the case of music, is spontaneously organized between the performers.
The Human Loudspeakers: Living Radios event should happen everywhere in every moment, as a spontaneous participative performance or can be coordinated on a larger scale (a flash mob square/city/region/nation/worldwide) by a radio broadcast on a specific palimpsest.
The first example happened in June 2013 (in the frame of Alessandro Sciaraffa as a part of collective performance Ti con Zero Radio / Greater Torino: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GLybU-9WjI in Contemporary Art Gallery Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin.
In those cases I conceived a performance, happening during other events in the whole space, whose title was Radio Tre Live: some persons wearing headphones connected to a portable radio tuned to RAI RadioTre (the cultural channel of national broadcast), walk all around trying to reproduce with the voice the radio program.
“I don't make MY music, I simply repeat the vibrations I receive; I function as a repeater, I am a radio.” (Karlheinz Stockhausen)
Reference and suggestion:
From Philip Auslander: Going with the Flow Performance Art and Mass Culture *1
“The figures on the stage in Anderson's and Gray's works are themselves representations of alterity. In his description of the voice on the radio quoted above, Sartre notes that "the voice becomes vertiginous for every- one: it's no longer anyone's voice (even if the broadcaster is named), since reciprocity has been destroyed. [. . .] it produces me as an inert member of a series and as Other in the midst of Others [. . .]" (1976:274). “
From Philip Auslander: Live From Cyberspace *2
“That is, even if you’re listening to a recording, there is usually little doubt that it is a recording of a performance by a human being. The ambiguity created by radio has to do with the ontology of the performance (live or recorded), not with the ontological status of the performer (human or non-human). The chatterbot forces the discussion of liveness to be reframed as a discussion of the ontology of the performer rather than that of the performance.”
GG. Torino, October 24 2021
1 - https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/6/11/files/2017/12/Auslander-Going-with-the-Flow.pdf, accessed on December 9, 2020.
2 - https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/6/11/files/2018/12/24_1auslander.pdf, accessed on December 9, 2020