What happens when a mediated personality, (streamer, influencer, z-list celebrity, band member engaging in between song banter or radio DJ) goes off script, in the space between choreographed events? In this liminal temporal space the stutter and the para-language becomes the new song. Ranging from lip smacks, ums & aahhs, speaking moistly, ASMR, musing on who the audience is, pondering on who is in the lonely city or lurking on the fridges of the network, including timbral play with their own voice and voicing repressed desires formed in COVID-19 isolation and embedded with a reincarnated spirit of an 'I Saw You' ad from the personals columns.

This interactive soundscape of structured improvisational performance for voice, microphone and electronics explores the interregnum of public yet intimate space that is the embedded in the widespread practice of 'close' mic-ing, where a speaker and an audience whisper to each other acoustically inches or even millimetres ( in the case of headphone listening ) away, the global digital network between them not withstanding.

Creating bridges with other mediums such as the ‘I Saw You’ or forlorn missed connection columns in lost printed newspapers and breaking with the rigid strictures of media formatting, such as dead-air, snappy segues, concise hype-filled descriptions, self-written biographies and a curated public persona, this performance reaches to intrigue the listener and leave us questioning: Are our virtual explorations a connection or a reflection? Are we paying twitch streamers to be our friend surrogates? Are these on-demand relationships just one-sided?

This work continues a long interest of using sound and algorithms to make an assay of mediated online spaces, to eavesdrop on what people desire in them. In 2003 I used the realtime searches of the GNUtella peer-to-peer file sharing network as found poetry to create a generative soundscape. This now is an examination of close mic-ed intimacy. The context for this piece is COVID-19 longing, but also more generally questions the affect and effectiveness of mediated space to connect. As Arcade Fire’s Reflektor laments – “I thought, I found the connector, It’s just a reflektor”. As Michael Snow’s Wavelength meticulously interrogated the trapezoid in front of the camera and onto the screen, this work in turn tries to break, invert, and reform the reverberations between mediated speakers and listeners – us.

The conceit for An Unconscious Air is that you have come to this place, this device, to listen to someone familiar, imagine for a moment you have switched on a podcast, connected to a streaming personality or simply switched on talk radio, then something else starts…

I’d like to acknowledge Velveeta Krisp’s Close Encounters (Audio Art Volume 6, 2015), Alvin Lucier’s classic work I Am Sitting In A Room (Lovely Music Ltd, 1981), the Sum Art Gallery and Bobbi Koznuk for providing a forum to develop an earlier forms of this piece, the “Missed Connection” back pages of the Georgia Straight and the users of Lex a queer connections application, all for your part in infusing and inspiring this continuation.