Machine Listening – Voyce Walkr
Saturday, 5 September⋅10:00 – 10:30am
At 10 am this morning Machine Listening present a reimagining of Russel Hoban’s post-apocalyptic 1980 novel ‘Riddley Walker’, updated, reworked, and distilled in response to our technological present.
‘Voyce Walkr’ recasts Hoban’s nuclear devastation as a collapse brought on by carbon capitalism and techno-solutionism. The environment is ravaged, language has warped and degraded, and computing and other advanced technologies have vanished. Society is now organised around a myth about the causes of the collapse – The User Story – broadcast daily over a rudimentary radio network made from salvaged parts. This is the ‘voyce walking’ of the work’s title. The piece evokes radio’s various golden age(s) at the same time as the story imagines radio as a crude post-apocalyptic medium, far in the future. Time has been deliberately scrambled. Cloned children tell of coming ‘infomayshun barms’ on vintage radios. Old stories of dystopian futures tuned in to the anxieties of the present.