Welcome to Canned Audio. Thank you for taking a moment out of your busy day to experience this space in a new way. These audio installations play on an indefinite mono loop in the restrooms on LL3, LL1, and Balcony Level 3 in The Lindemann Performing Arts Center at the discretion of BAI staff. This activation aims to transform a utility space into something new/unexpected. We hope you enjoy it.

AInauguration

As a German major at Princeton, I read Freud’s essay Das Unheimliche. The word Heimlich has two conflicting meanings: homey/cozy and secret. Unheimlich is not simply the opposite; it is a mixture of the familiar and the strange.

AI embodies this duality, creating content that is realistic yet somehow unfamiliar - an unsettling digital doppelgänger. Once I recognized this, I felt compelled to collaborate with it artistically. I want to watch it interpret the human world, to see what it digs up from our collective unconscious.

My freshman year, I snuck into one of P. Adams Sitney’s screening of avant garde films. Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren flickered on the screen, and I felt like I was levitating an inch above my seat, only taking shallow breaths as not to break the spell. After the screening, the other students laughed and talked and left the room, and I wondered (and doubted) if anyone had this same experience as me. It was a moment that felt entirely my own, and made me feel even more removed from my classmates.

Here, I explore how my digital doppelgänger might experience an avant garde film (in this case, Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome), to see if a large language model could also have an out of body experience.

Critical Inquiry

Aanya Kaur Agrawal
Located on LL1 and Balconies

Dreamscape (10.3-10.4)

Sophia Nicogossian
Located on LL1 and Balconies
Audio composition (10 minutes, 36 seconds) derived from sleep EEG, EOG, and EKG data.

The Red Umbrella

Evie Dumont, Hugo Pierre Martin
Located on LL3
This an episode of the diaries of netovicius the vampire performed by Brown Trinity MFA actor Evie Dumont. Recorded in the Granoff Recording Studio

Field Recording 19

Locus Stream

The Locus Sonus Stream Project offers a worldwide network of "open mics" that permanently stream local soundscapes to a dedicated server. The resulting live audio is used in a large variety of artistic projects. The microphones are installed and maintained by volunteer participants. The nearest source to Brown University is currently in Leverett, Massachusetts, and is operated by Mike Bullock and Linda Gale Aubry at Ears In Space.
 Listen to the Leverett, MA, Live Stream

The Full Concept Unification Installation Tape