Violence is not inevitable. It’s an expression of culturally specific values that emerges when struggles over things are transformed into imperatives to injure others, human and beyond-human. Cadence Interrupted, one part of a larger multi-media installation featuring a variety of materials and artistic forms, probes the values and frameworks of the violence engendered through both the human/gun composite and militarism’s phenomenal power to create a change in someone’s state of mind even as it infiltrates and mediates the human social fabric.
A 3-D video features Joe Chip, a figure from Philip Dick’s novel, Ubik, who wears a life jacket to protect himself from drowning in a surreal, deteriorating reality. Having never held a gun in his hand, Joe, nevertheless, by virtue of having absorbed the synergy of what Nick Turse calls America’s “military-industrial- technological-entertainment-academic-media-corporate” complex, can approximate the anatomical motions activated when putting together a gun, blindfolded. The call-and-response chant of a military training-camp cadence (also known as a jody call) provides rhythm and marching precision, but also careful consideration of how the martial attitudes imbued in these military songs induce attitude changes in those performing them. In this interactive installation, the participant’s right hand, hovering over the head of a snare drum—an instrument historically connected to warfare as its sonic accompaniment, morale booster, and rhythmic regulator for the loading of weapons—becomes the protagonist for examining these relationships, essentially using bodily presence to compose a change in the drum’s specific behavior-shaping values by interrupting the techniques and sonic affordances (cadences) connected to the instrument’s military roots.
This work was developed by TUG Collective (Gaelyn and Gustavo Aguilar, Co-Founders) in collaboration with: Melody Loveless (Musician, Educator, Creative Technologist, Multimedia Artist); Winslow Porter (Director, Producer, Creative Technologist); Yonatan Rozin (Interactive Technologist, Musician, Web Developer); Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center; NYU Tandon @ The Yard.
