Bitumen, tar, steel, cotton, surface transducers, 5-channel sound composition, 2024

The five tar sculptures function as low-frequency emmiters. They transmit the first five seconds of Britney Spears’s Toxic, reportedly recorded in the weeks of the US invasion of Iraq. The song’s opening sequence (itself a sample from a Bollywood film) is recomposed here as a five-voice drone, forming one polyphonous body beaming out a frozen detail of a pop anthem. The composition is rendered through auto-tune, a technology built from algorithms first designed to locate oil underground. The bitumen acts both as a resonator through which the sound is transmitted and as a damper, distorting and filtering the sound from within.

Commissioned by 15th Gwangju Biennale with the additional support by Stimuleringsfonds NL