Output details

Unsound Systems

Unsound Systems was a research project and sound installation carried out by Dr. Toby Heys and Dr. Steve Goodman (University of East London). The project was curated into the exhibition Art in the Name of Security by Embedded Art (Olaf Arndt, Moritz von Rappard, Janneke Schönenbach, and Cecilia Wee), at the Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts), Berlin, from 24 January to 22 March 2009 (http://www.embeddedart.cfnt3.de/index.cfm?id=1227&as=14170&ln=uk).

It was the first socio-political installation based on crowd control that relied solely on sound. Unsound Systems investigated how citizens have been subjected to increasing measures of state control since the 9/11 attacks. In particular it focused upon the ways in which sound, ultrasound, and infrasound have been deployed by military and policing organisations to control ‘hostile’ individuals and crowds. The methodology utilised for this research was cross-disciplinary given the diverse range of subjects, which included musicology, physics, and neurology. Research was carried out by interviewing protestors who had been subjected to sonic ‘non-lethal weaponry’ and through research into key articles on the subject such as Jürgen Altmann’s Acoustic Weapons – A Prospective Assessment (Science & Global, 1998). Whilst this seminal text is technically adept and informative, it lacks any first-hand evidence of the affects of non-lethal weapons. The Unsound Systems installation addressed this problem and offered a more balanced and nuanced account of the physiological and psychological dynamics of falling victim to a non-lethal weapon attack. In 2009 a 183-page book about the exhibition and the works in it was published by Argo Books(ISBN: 978-3-941560-09-3).