DEAD AIR
2019
Binaural audio walk.
9’50.
Full audio work, documentation.
Moving the listener through the RMIT City Campus and the flanking walls of the Metro Tunnel construction project, Dead Air overlays a catastrophic future narrative onto hostile features of the existing space. By implicating real details in a fictional storyline, the work creates a state where the present, future and past become inseparable, and where the actual and virtual become entangled.
The walk situates the participant within a future-focussed anxious narrative, where tensions around environmental and social collapse inhabit the physical space of the walk. The construction of the Metro Tunnel begins to take on mystical and monstrous significance as a metaphor for humanity’s need to dominate space by digging and building.
Additional vocal performances by Roderick Cairns, Eve Gilbert, Luc Favre and Mike Greaney.