Audiobombs Hit the Streets This Spring

The history of graffiti will reveal the political rhetoric of the oppressed through images and slogans. Indeed, the voices of many otherwise unheard have shined through the use of graffiti. Look at all the tagging of graffiti artist signatures on trains and underpasses. The graffiti image may seem ambiguous and ever changing, sometimes incomprehensible. This is in stark contrast, or perhaps camouflaged against the never ending sea of advertisements that are meant to be recognizable. When the graffiti image is rendered in a style that relates political messages or utilizes visual iconography, it usually pulls from existing visual tropes, similar to its advertising counterpart, as advertising seeks to consume the entire visual field of those wandering through the spectacles of society.

The creativity of street culture shines when public spaces are reconfigured in a creative way by the public, the community, or even a group of urban adventurers. Think skateboarders, bmxers, graffiti artists: these people utilize urban environments in ways that break through the social milieu analyzed by the Situationists in terms of The Spectacle. Graffiti is rooted in the practice of the Situationists, who believed that through the act of The situation is defined by the group as “a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events.” Skateboarding is a literal example: the moment one grinds the rail is detournment, the wandering around the urban landscape is the derive, when someone gains an intellectual understanding of their relationship to architecture is psychogeography. Billboard Liberators and culture jammers exemplify this sort of existence, weaving in and out of consumer culture to reveal some hidden meaning in the advertising messages that surround the public at large.

Occasionally, the flaneur will wander by the stencil of an image and ponder on the aesthetic of the spray painted stamp on a cracking and decaying urban backdrop. Do we mostly remain passive, only able to suckle on an endless supply of the same entertainment formula? As more of the younger generations remain cut-off auditory from the environment, trapped in a soundscape of genre specific tunes on an iPod. The real and the virtual blend in ways in regards to human perception very few have begun to understand. Until we all wear virtual headsets to work, there is still hope to break open the social milieu in ways that will make people question everyday existence. The creative impulse rests between the wrists and the keybaord of most computer users, machines capable of producing only what the mind can imagine.

Audiobombing is a form of sonic graffiti that is beginning to happen all around the world. Audiobombs come in all shapes and sizes. A cheap device can be made out of a simple recording module found at Radioshack for less than $10US. This is suitable for pranking in an enclosed space or somewhere without a lot of noise. Kang Chang, Kyle Millns, and Mike Fleming, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, created audiobombs out of old cassette tape decks and magnetic tape. This project involves stringing up magnetic tape and using a hacked tape deck with exposed heads to listen in on whatever is recorded onto the tape. While is design does reuse older technologies, its design involves a lock/key method of having to hack a cassette tape deck to hear the hidden messages recorded onto the magnetic tape. But if you are looking for a programmable alternative, Ladyada has developed the Wave Shield for the Arduino microcontroller. With this device, you can load WAV files onto a SD card and write a custom program that triggers sound to play through an 8 Ohm speaker. This method involves knowledge of soldering electronics and basic audio theory.

In Syracuse, NY, audiobombs have appeared on sites around the Syracuse University main campus. Audio bombs that were planted emitted the sounds of the crow. Audio agents embedded themselves among murders of crows weeks previous to capture the sounds of those animals who would usually inhabit the space, despite human intervention. Audio bombs were planted in response to the academic institution’s persistent use of sonic devices that that deter crows from inhabiting the wooded areas on top of the hill. This interferes with the crows’ typical migration patterns. Technology is thus placed as a countermeasure to interfere with existing man made measures, a jamming device.

This mission was successful, as minutes after the audiobombs were planted, crows began descending from the sky, perching on top of the very academic structures that are the reason for their exclusion. Audiobombs thus produce an environmental change in the immediate space, but it is yet to be tested whether or not these devices can be a prelude to social change, in comparison with image and textual based graffiti. Indeed when audiobombs catch you off guard perhaps it may ignite a mode of critical thinking about your environment, or in my case the impact of humans on the surrounding.