The Dead Letter Office
The sonic and sculptural installation utilised sonic, ultrasonic and infrasonic speakers within the gallery to produce a range of frequencies that reside at the edge of perception. The gallery was pitch black and could only be traversed using a torch that was handed to audience members as they entered the space.
For the past 60 years, AUDiNT has been conducting research, rituals, and experiments into the opening of the 3rd ear, a dimension that is opened when sound, ultrasound, and infrasound are simultaneously deployed in a precise schema of sequencing, duration, and amplification. The 3rd ear forms a conduit for the channelling of voices and frequencies, allowing communication between the living and the dead, sanity and insanity and between disparate locations in space and time.
Ever since AUDiNT’s defection from the U.S. military at the end of WWII, our mission has been to submerge the frequency-based phenomenon that had been accidentally discovered by the Ghost Army (when they deployed 3 turntables to fabricate deceptive soundscapes intended to deceive the Nazi’s as to the true numbers and whereabouts of the allied forces). Wishing to keep this powerful sonic weapon out of government and military hands, AUDiNT’s founding members smashed the original battlefield discs, and split the waveformed content of the original master recordings into small packages of sound which were then discretely embedded into sound effects and stereo fidelity
records.
Throughout the following decades AUDiNT were responsible for the mass production of the test tone record and special effects vinyl - a collection that ended up in flee markets, thrift stores and church bazaars, forming what is known as ‘The Dead Record Network’. It was through the Dead Record Network that we distributed these encrypted recordings as an open secret, ensuring that, in the future, the vital bits of analogue information concerning the ultimate vibrational weapon discovered during WWII would remain in a fragmented social circulation.
Adapting to the tactical battlefields of the 21st century networks, capitalizing on the viral dynamics of digital networks, we are systematically uploading our research archive that has been compiled throughout the past 60 years (while probing the hauntological power of sonic weaponry). This ritualized uploading of the spectral archive aims to create a prospective archive of waveformed affect that is propagated throughout the living dead networks of our communication systems. This tactical shift - to open up our archive to the public - relates to our new mandate of arming the mass populace with the efficacy of sonic weaponry so that it does not become the sole preserve of the military-entertainment complex. With its dark science and sonically dissonant content, AUDiNT’s 'Dead Record Office' is the enshrined location from which this viral transfer begins.
The GhostCoder software that we produced for the 'Dead Record Office' is an encryption utility used to embed sound files or spoken text files within flac music files using spectral analysis to encode the research beyond the listeners hearing range. This information piggybacks on top of popular music files and torrents without being noticed, thus creating a networked distribution as an archival method of important information. The information or the torrent stream can then be decoded with the GhostCoder to yield the embedded information. The GhostCoder is intended to use viral dynamics as an archiving tool to ensure important data stays within the public domain.