Silence Is Deathly Painful

The audio used in this work comes from an archive of recordings that were conducted by a computer program. This program listened to talk radio broadcasts across the United States from 2019-2022 and recorded what happened before, during, and after moments of silence that occurred on these broadcasts. This software generated an archive of recordings that captured the voices and ideologies of broadcasters commentating on events that happened throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This audio material was manipulated and used as the sound design for a new animation work where a boy explores a surreal world that is overrun with radio infrastructure. Many of the visual forms in the work are robotically replicated, which echoes the path toward "radio homogenization" in America that began in the 1990s with the 1996 Telecommunications Act that made radio monopolies flourish.