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The Sonic History of Spectres Project:
A research on the materiality of auditory ghosts in and around technology

2022 and ongoing
related to this research see also: 
hyper-personalized communications

Based on my theoretical research of the inherently ghostly qualities of technological media and mediation processes in general, this work is an attempt to make the simultaneity of technology, human projections onto it, its marketing and natural phenomena visible and, above all, audible and to create an immersive moment in which one can consciously listen to the spirits of technology.

Throughout history, ghosts as expressions of the ephemeral and the invisible have been associated with technological modes of action that are too small for us to comprehend as material. Through media, through technological devices, spirits are repeatedly attempted to be reached: through the telegraph, through the radio, through recording devices, the TV. Or rather the spirits speak to us, using the specific functioning of the devices, mostly through sound. Spiritual encounters through and with technology circulate in science fiction and in spiritualist practice and in contemporary advertising, when devices again quite literally get a voice, in smart homes.

The installation here documented consists of a generative soundscape made of edited field recordings with video animations and small excerpts of a more classical narrative auditory storytelling.

It can be an illustration of a techno-human milieu that collects mainly those sounds that represent the "living side" of technology: Ghost voices, glitches, the inner workings of devices such as routers, tape recorders, feedback, but also signal tones such as modified Morse code, which are also reminiscent of signal tones from telephones and mobile phones.
Beacuse of randomized automisation, the soundscape and the appearance of the video is always different, constantly changing and sometimes eluding the expected listening experience.

00:00 / 04:22

In contrast to the soundscape, the short audio piece "messages" tells a personal perspective and lets me appear as the narrator in fragments, in moods and sounds. An excerpt of everyday life between smart home and commerce, between conspiracy theories and the ghostly.

00:00 / 08:54
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