Who: Cullen Miller & Gabriel Dunne
What: Soundwave Festival presents ‘Networked Utopias’
When: 8pm | 2 November 2017
Where: Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA

“Latency”, a performance by Gabriel Dunne and Cullen Miller, delves into the experience of discontinuity in mediated digital communications. The piece builds a sonic narrative produced through affects of networks, computing, and daily devices. Foreign proxies, Ethereum mining, noise, geopolitics, reliance on private infrastructure, packet hop metadata, surveillance capitalism, and data loss are sonified through bespoke software and hardware. The piece instrumentalizes custom software applications that sonifies and visualizes network packets into unique scales as data hops through various geopolitical network topologies. Making use of an Ethereum mining rig, Miller and Dunne created an event model that converts the hash rate, block size, transaction hash, and kW/hour into modulation sources for various parameters in their synthesis model. The final movement consists of a live accompaniment from a pre-trained Amazon Alexa with inquiries about gendered labor and sous-veillance.