We are happy to announce the first release in our new established ‘Sound Writings’ series: Drone Pilot by writer, sound artist, and programmer Ian Hatcher (*1983). His work explores cognition in the context of digital systems. While studying Digital Language Arts at Brown University, he came up with his own propositions in this field: the way he trained his own voice, prosody and word-flow to mimick the qualities and even glitches of speech-synthesis is extremely suitable for a realization in sound; he states: “Drone Pilot is a work of voice/sound poetry about a person who becomes part of a huge impersonal war machine, connected to a network of power and violence, which ultimately erases the person's individuality. My work is focused on the entanglement of humans and machines. I'm interested in how a mind can be imprinted with digital logic, and how digital and human memory can extend each other. I perform my work with just my voice, without electronics, but electronics are always present, in the aesthetics of the performance and the electrical currents of the body”.
We met Ian in 2015 in his hometown Brooklyn where he participated in the International Festival Of Text-Sound-Poetry, and invited him to our cOsmOsmOse Festival (Düsseldorf 2016), where we learned about his ideas and artistic practice.
Sound Writings is a subdivision of cOsmOsmOse, dedicated to contemporary works of Text-Sound-Poetry. cOsmOsmOse has the aim to present (festival) and document (publishing) contemporary artists who work in the field of Text-Sound-Poetry. It was founded by Swantje Lichtenstein and Marc Matter (Artistic Direction), and is assisted by
Artwork By – Marco Papiro
Recorded at Arcadia, Fort Valley, VA (USA), September 2016 No digital effects were applied to this recording.
The Base contains lines adapted from
O mother, I burned by Mahadeviyakka (1130–1160) translated by A. K. Ramanujan, in Speaking of Siva (1973)
Thank you to Raka Banerjee, Ari Kalinowski, Patrick LeMieux, Swantje Lichtenstein, Marc Matter, Stephanie Strickland, and my family.
