Siren

Siren, 2014
single-channel video projection with sound, 26’24”, looped, streamed from wireless network device

Siren appropriates a controversial scene featuring Hedy Lamarr from the silent 1933 film Extase and marries it to the soundtrack from George Antheil’s 1924 avant-garde composition Ballet mécanique. The climax of the footage is timed to coincide with the sound of a whirling hand-crank siren. This video sequence, looped endlessly and played back on a streaming wireless network, is an affectual response to Lamarr and Antheil’s landmark invention of a Secret Communication System, widely known today as frequency hopping, the basis of wireless communication technology.