Kiai: Hypothetical Behaviour-Mod Alarms

Thomas Bey William Bailey

Origin: Static Issue 06
Content: Text/Audio

‘MP3: Kiai

Kiai’ (named after the freezing ‘spirit yell’ used in Japanese martial arts) are a set of highly abrasive, unsettling alarms to be used for the purposes of behavior modification – the first urban deterrents of their kind to be deployed city-wide in non-emergency situations. These miniature sound pieces explore, and perhaps parody, the intense overkill often employed by first-world ‘nanny states’ in order to maintain any degree of control and social order. At the same time, it comments on the decreasing lack of direct person-to-person communication that would render such extreme devices unnecessary.

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Contributor:

Thomas Bey William Bailey (a.k.a. Thomas Transparent, and musically active as The Domestic Front) is a nomadic, multi-disciplinary artist affected by the ‘saturation society’ of the twenty-first century, by artistic non-specialization and synaesthesia, and by the search for a better symbiosis between nature and human artifice. As a sound artist, he works with sounds which skirt along the edges of perception, with the indistinct and vaguely familiar, and also with amplifications of highly personal elements within his psychological and physiological makeup.

Associated Links:
www.belsona-strategic.com