"The STA is a mobile and place-based audio project aimed to convey our collective human voice while simultaneously investigating the historic human impulse to transmit into the unknown. We will be developing a digital archiving and transmission platform which will collect, randomize, and transmit our sonic contributions in perpetuity. STA is a large scale interactive sonic collaboration interfacing directly with the individuals comprising the communities we visit, as well as virtually engaging with participants from around the world. By prompting and collecting sounds, experiences and ideas in a open and unbiased structure, we hope to provide a platform which illuminates the agency and power of voice as the representative force of our larger collective community. The ultimate goal with STA is to transmit this growing sonic time capsule into interstellar space as a modernized, reflexive and democratized representation of humanity, shaped and formed directly by the voices within.
We are both deeply inspired by the intention, development and realization of the Voyager Golden Record, launched by NASA in 1977 as a multidimensional transmissive archive designed to communicate directly with the cosmos. However, as individuals living and working in the Twenty-First century, we recognize the inherent flaw regarding the design of a fixed representation of human history conceived by a small and homogenous group of scientists and academics.
As two Sound Artists with backgrounds in Anthropology and Radio, we are fascinated by the link between the history and potential of extraterrestrial, spiritual, and sonic communication. We see Transmission both as a physical and metaphoric representation of a participatory and accessible unconscious, a platform that grants one their own space to communicate honestly and freely into the unknown.
The Artists-in-Vacancy (AIV) residency in Newburgh, NY, will be the first iteration of this project: A research phase we are using to collect and create sounds, investigate reflect and generate approaches to transmission, community, legacy and contact. Hosted by the Newburgh Community Land Bank, the AIV project is “a creative initiative addressing vacancy & abandonment in Newburgh by re-imagining vacant sites as places for community engagement, artistic production, aesthetic & cultural research, and renewed inhabitation.” As part of our residency, we will be transforming and repurposing a vacant Property in Newburgh as the inaugural home base for the Sonic Transmission Archive. While in residence, we will be recording the sounds of Newburgh, designing and experimenting with electronics, Transmitters, synthesizers, hosting workshops and performances that explore emotional, spiritual, and communal connection through sound.
Ethan Primason + Caroline Partamian"