To hear on Sunday 20 and 27 September 2015, 2pm - 9pm:
Democracy isn't just a Tweet away
(2015, German Premiere)
by Shelly Knotts (UK)
Shelly Knotts on'Democracy isn't just a Tweet away':
"Democracy isn’t just a Tweet away" [1] comments on the simplification and polarisation of political rhetoric and on popular opinions that Twitter and other social media platforms are democratising forces in the 21st century, for example the widely held view that Twitter was a powerful force capable of liberating the Iranian people in the 2009 Iranian elections. The installation uses a set of collated tweets from political leaders. The tweets are analysed for their word usage and re-synthesised using audio recordings of political speeches. The sound of the ‘audio-tweets’ will be processed so that words which are more commonly used are more audible to visitors to the installation and infrequently used words are highly processed to the point of being unrecognisable, forming a incomprehensible backdrop of vocal-like sounds.
[1] Gedmin, Jeffrey. (2010, April 22). Democracy isn’t just a tweet away. Link to the online article.
Audio Field Report no. 35 / sound activism 14: Interview with Shelly Knotts by Knut Remond. Limited Edition Audio cassette, 8 copies numbered. Available at 'ohrenhoch - the Noise Shop' (and can be heard there on headphone).
Shelly Knotts is a data-musician who presents live-coded and network-technology facilitated music internationally, collaborating with computers and other humans. She has received several commissions and residencies and was part of Sound and Music's 'New Voices' emerging-composer development scheme in 2014-15.
She is studying for a PhD with Nick Collins and Peter Manning at Durham University. Her research interests lie in the political practices implicit in collaborative network music performance practice and designing systems which play with particular data structures for algorithmic and improvised music creation.
Shelly is a co-founder and project manager of the Network Music Festival.
Current collaborative projects include network laptop bands BiLE (Birmingham Laptop Ensemble) and FLO (Female Laptop Orchestra), and live coding projects [Sisesta Pealkiri] with Alo Allik and BALLOTTS with Holger Ballweg.