Obituary for Privacy

Obituary for Privacy

bani haykal

4:33 min (PAUSE TO EXIT) Located in the Duty-Free Shopping Mall of T Fondaco dei Tedeschi (Near Rialto Bridge). Pick up the sound outside this location and walk into the center of the Mall.

“Citizens within modulated democracies — citizens who are subject to pervasively distributed surveillance and modulation by powerful commercial and political interests — increasingly will lack the ability to form and pursue meaningful agendas for human flourishing.” - Julie Cohen (What Privacy Is For)

I grew up listening to disembodied voices laughing at an image. Canned laughter was a control mechanism to influence the effectiveness of a humorous idea. Much like the present state of democracies in several parts of the world, organising and informing public opinion on privacy and its politics is like a sitcom: the same actors involved preach dichotomous world views on what is right and wrong. But the magic behind these modulated political stages is an instrument, the Laff Box, operated by a ghost actor, a phantom that projects a manufactured consensus, the illusion of public opinion.

My proposition is to liberate the phantom. Reveal the mechanism that has shaped public opinion on privacy and surveillance so that as a society we can discuss the gaps and distortions of our shared anxieties.

bani haykal experiments with text + music. As an artist, composer and musician, bani considers music (making/processes) as a metaphor for cybernetics and his projects revolve around modes of interfacing and interaction in feedback/feedforward mechanisms. He is a member of b-quartet and Soundpainting ensemble Erik Satay & The Kampong Arkestra.

Sound Works © The Artists and Contributors Texts © The Artists, Contributors and Curator Website © Sonic Soundings / Venice Trajectories

All rights are reserved, including the rights of reproduction, distribution, translation in whole or in part in any form.