With their project, »Future Voices/Zukunftsmusik,« the Society for Nontrivial Pursuits invited people worldwide to give voice to what they expect, hope, or fear for the future.
Both radio and internet began as projects for two-way communication – hopes were high that everyone would be given a voice. The radio quickly became a one-way mass medium that played a central role in 20th century dictators grabbing power, while the internet has drifted toward hyper-monetization, citizen surveillance, and extremism. The attention economy embodied in the rating mechanisms of most social media favors loudness and conspiracy theories, creating filter bubbles and digital tribes, while a multitude of less provocative individual voices tends to get lost in this flood.
S4NTP – a group of students, teachers, and associates of the class Generative Art / Computational Art at UdK Berlin – believe these voices can have constructive things to say, and developed a project inviting a diversity of voices to contribute their ideas, expectations, fears, hopes, and strategies for the future to a sonic collective stream of consciousness. Anyone interested was invited to access the projects’ web page, speak a few sentences in a language of their choice (or make other sonic or musical statements), and upload the recording. These recordings flowed into a generative composition exploring the continuum between intelligible multi-lingual spoken text and abstract musical textures, varying in density from single-voice focus to rich polyphony. The S4NTP team kept adapting and expanding the compositional modules based on the scope, meaning, and intention of the contributions, creating a supportive context for them like a rhythm section for a soloist.
In order to value the contributions with responsibility and artistic integrity, the conversation with the contributors continued on a second layer: S4NTP crafted the database of annotated sound files accessible via a web interface, so listeners can look up what they hear or read, find related statements and links, and thus engage more deeply with the flow of ideas expressed in the »Zukunftsmusik« stream.
Commissioned as part of the CTM Radio Lab, led by CTM Festival and Deutschlandfunk Kultur – Radio Art / Klangkunst in collaboration with Goethe-Institut, ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, Ö1 Kunstradio, and The Wire magazine.