As a verb, gad is defined as “to move from one location to another in an apparently random and frivolous manner”. It is also an abbreviation for General Anxiety Disorder. Floating in a virtual realm where cultural markers, gender, position and race are symbolic and arbitrary, and where subjectivity becomes divorced from the constraints of locality, “GAD Technologies” adds to existing geopolitical complexities and representations.
The project also engages with the decentralised nature of emergent self organised networks that fall outside established power structures and draws attention to communities underrepresented on the global map, while examining concerns about erasure of privacy and the utopian promise of democracy and freedom through the potential for self-publishing on the plethora of the internet’s platforms.
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.