Ear in the cloud: acoustical accidents and clouded texts in Stelarc's internet ear.

Abstract

November 10, 2010, Utzon Centre, Aalborg, Denmark: Stelarc's Internet Ear, suddenly and unwittingly, is able to 'hear' and 'broadcast' what was said at a meeting held by the Danish Ethical Council in another part of the building. The transmission is fed back to the ear as 'speech-noise' – and broadcasted once again, creating a feedback loop of fragmented announcements from a debate on ethics. In this paper, I will take a closer look at how this acoustical accident created a situation where two different and, in some cases, opposing cultural patterns were reloaded / remixed into each other. By analysing this situation using the notions of ‘ontological theatre’ and ‘agency realism’ (Andrew Pickering), I am claiming that a collision of realities occurred which, in turn, addresses the issue of dislocated cultural identity in post-digital ‘cloud culture’.