Text by CLOT Magazine
Next Sunday, December 2, closes the inaugural exhibition of the Passen-gers off-site series: Disinformation ‘Language [as] Meta-Technology. Passen-gers is a site-specific exhibition series exploring prominent sites and architecture’s historical, social and material contexts. It references the 1975 film The Passenger by Michelangelo Antonioni, which features the Brunswick Centre as a location. To encourage deeper discussion on architecture and the built environment, Gauld Architecture, a London-based architectural practice, supports the exhibitions.
CW Morris, Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, and Colin Cherry are four of the most prominent thinkers of our time on the subject of semiotics. If Umberto Eco was the ‘discipline studying everything which can be used to lie’, Roland Barthes associated signs with myths. In his The Fashion System, Barthes showed how the adulteration of signs could be translated into words.
Disinformation ‘Language [as] Meta-Technology, produced by Joe Banks, is an electronic music, arts research and installation art project whose work focuses on communications, electricity and language and goes a step further on this analysis of semiotics.
Disinformation‘Language [as] Meta-Technology takes language as metaTechnology by using a variety of speech recording, speech synthesis, psychoacoustics research and speech coding technologies. Other works also exhibited at Sluice HQ include Spellbound (2001).
This installation alludes to ethical dilemmas similar to those explored by the plays Copenhagen (1998) by Michael Frayn and Oppenheimer (2015) by Tom Morton-Smith and Theophany (2000), a recording of VLF-band radio noise radiated by a single lightning strike.
