ABOUT / NOT AN ENDORSEMENT
A machine for remembering
The Buzzer places a found signal inside a live visual system. The browser reads the recording’s waveform and rebuilds the image every frame: prismatic oscilloscopes, spectral mandalas, Lissajous knots, feedback tunnels, command grids, market charts, networks, targets, afterimages. Behind them, the Butterchurn WebGL engine mutates a rotating set of MilkDrop presets into an unstable subconscious layer. At the boundary, the full-level static tail dissolves for ten seconds into the recording’s naturally rising opening static. The overlap follows the source envelope, so the transmission has no audible or visual final frame.
Sound collage
The carrier is static from UVB-76, commonly nicknamed “The Buzzer”: a Russian shortwave station, widely associated with military communications, that has transmitted a near-continuous buzzing channel marker since the late Soviet period, interrupted only occasionally by coded voice messages.
Inside that carrier, the collage places a modern reconstruction of the wireless distress traffic sent by RMS Titanic in 1912—not a surviving recording—beside an excerpt from Protect and Survive, the British government’s stark civil-defence films made in the 1970s and brought into public view by the BBC in 1980. The reconstruction makes an early technological disaster audible; the calm instructional voice imagines nuclear catastrophe as something that can be administered through broadcast procedure.
An excerpt of the hymn Nearer, My God, to Thee joins those transmissions. The hymn is traditionally associated with Titanic’s final moments, and CNN kept a military-band performance in its archive as the network’s intended final broadcast in an “end of the world” scenario under Ted Turner. Here it becomes both elegy and media ritual: a song imagined at the end of a ship, a century, and television itself.
Listening backward, looking forward
The piece invites the audience to hear the twentieth century not as a closed archive but as a set of unfinished systems—military command, nuclear deterrence, mass broadcasting, market calculation, and technological acceleration—and to ask what habits of skepticism, mutual responsibility, and refusal of fatalism the twenty-first century might learn from their failures.
The quoted voices are not assembled into an argument, a pantheon, or a set of endorsements. Their collisions place declarations about weapons and political power beside promises of peace, theories of media, fantasies of historical closure, and the language of cybernetic acceleration, exposing how words can normalize a system, contest it, or make it feel inevitable.
Short archival quotations appear for critical and historical context. Dates identify the cited source, not necessarily the first time a phrase was spoken. The fragments are deliberately incomplete: the installation asks the listener to notice their contradictions rather than accept any one voice as its conclusion.
Fragments in the signal
- J. Robert Oppenheimer, NBC’s The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965), recalling the Trinity test and quoting his rendering of the Bhagavad Gita.
- Mao Zedong, “Problems of War and Strategy” (1938).
- Richard Nixon, First Inaugural Address (1969).
- Pierre Elliott Trudeau, remarks to the National Press Club in Washington (1969).
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964), The Medium Is the Massage (1967), and Culture Is Our Business (1970).
- Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, Geneva Summit joint statement (1985).
- Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” in The National Interest (1989).
- Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, “Communiqué One” (1998).
- Donald Trump, Twitter post (2 January 2018).
Live wire
Each new cycle receives a fresh visual seed. Delayed observations of the S&P 500, NASDAQ Composite, crude oil, gold, and BTC/USD alter the chart geometry, while short headline fragments enter a rotating cut-up engine. The method nods to Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg without imitating any writer’s voice: it only cuts and recombines the outside world. No two cycles are exactly identical.
The headline wire spans BBC World, CBC World, NPR World, Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle, France 24, ABC Australia, The Hindu, Channel NewsAsia, Africanews, and NHK. By letting prices and current headlines deform an archive of catastrophe, the live layer asks how twenty-first-century systems translate danger into a market signal, a notification, or content—and whether receiving more information necessarily gives us more understanding or agency. Market data may be delayed and is not financial advice; headline fragments remain attributable to their named publishers.
The installation requests these sources through a five-minute, privacy-preserving server cache. The audience’s browser contacts no news or finance company directly.
Sound: the buzzer.mp3 (06:49, continuously overlapped)
Visual system and montage: st ipod, 2026
WebGL underlay: Butterchurn 2.6.7 with Butterchurn Presets 2.4.7 (MIT: engine license, preset license)
↓ download the source audio