Silence, a Drone

Artist
Rhett Tsai

Creation media and date
Sound, video, 2020

Description
Silence, a Drone is an experiment in Chinese character sound writing by artist Rhett Tsai using the Max program and is a continuation of his Smart City series. Moreover, this work is a response to the crisis caused by the age of the smart city and the so-called digital humans. The interface of this work shows 18 avatars of Joe, a virtual person. The human voice poetry in this work describes the story of Joe, a citizen living in the smart city of “WeCity”, and the words that cannot be uttered (sensitive words) in WeCity turn into long drones. In this work, you can read and understand the texts in any direction.
In this work, the artist presents a critical reflection on the current media society (especially China’s social media environment where sensitive words abound) in the form of a sound poem. Using granular synthesis, the artist transforms the parts of the human voice that touch on sensitive words into lasting drones. On the one hand, it responds to the “unspeakable” and “silent” nature of sensitive words, and on the other hand, the resonance of these eighteen drones constitutes, in a sense, a collective voice of “silence”.

沉默的长音

艺术家
蔡宇潇

创作媒介及年份
声音及视频，2020年

作品简介
艺术家以自己的面部为基础，用GAN技术虚构了智能城市市民乔（Joe）的十八个化身，他们分別发出的十八段人声描述了乔的故事，而那些在该城市中无法说出的话则化为一段段「沉默」的长音。
您可从任意方向阅读／理解作品中的文本。