Let me tell you (2018)

Let me tell you (2018) is a fixed media sound work created using a cassette tape loop and digital effects. It is a mediation on the consumer pressures of the corporate-controlled digital age and the anxieties of the people who consume within it. It is based around the opening musical notes of Han Abrahamsen’s orchestral work Let Me Tell You, which is based on the experimental novel Let Me Tell You by Paul Griffiths, which is, in turn, based around the words that Ophelia speaks in the Shakespeare play Hamlet.

This cyclical, co-recursive lineage of references is used a gateway for ‘eavesdropping’ on the processes used by online social networks to market people’s own data back to them, in turn creating states of homophily (i.e. social echo chambers) and feelings of depression and loneliness in its users. In the same way that Ophelia’s descent into madness represents the corruption of the Danish court, the melancholic end of Let Tell You points to the need for resistance against the inescapable network of the algorithm in the digital age.

Let me tell you was selected for inclusion on Catalyst Audio Tracks 001 and was premiered at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC), Belfast, on 17 August 2018.