SONIFICATION OF DATA… PROTECTION

An immersive / interactive sound installation (first presented in the Marseille Observatory planetarium)

sample excerpt…

Sonification of correspondence with an agent from the data protection office (DPO): my messages mapped and scaled to a men’s choir, female DPO agent’s messages (to me) mapped and scaled to a women’s choir, and the system messages (date stamps, attachment info, etc.) mapped and scaled to a church organ…

Conceived in a non-linear manner, right around the time of visiting Notre-Dame de la Garde —a basilica overlooking Marseille, as guardian and gatekeeper. Its reverberant acoustics evoke sacredness. The building’s presence, in a country where secularism is a new sacred, speaks to how certain symbols remain, beliefs and myths merely transformed.

The DPO correspondences echoed this for me. An institution charged with safeguarding the vulnerable, but also with defining who may enter, who may speak. As an artist navigating these structures, I felt both the value of restraint (grateful for a system protecting patients from exploitation and mistreatment) and the frustration of delay to produce works I could share with gratitude to Marseille. All the while grateful to the administrators who make possible the logistical reality for my work. I’d aimed to continue co-creating musical pieces from interviews with people sharing their experiences with cancer. This piece became a way to work with the available —the layered textures of delay itself— in order to find something transcendent and beautiful. The idea that data (donnée) is not simply given—it is a gift (don). And that trust, like music, takes time to build.

Beneath the architecture and the admin, are also personal silences: the knowledge of what it means to move through systems shaped by histories you inherit but don’t speak of. Of carrying stories that linger in cathedrals, in bureaucracies, in silences that echo. Of knowing that passing —hiding— can feel like surviving.

Not only awful, but awe-full. Bureaucracy, like biology, is full of coded protections, redundancies, checks and balances—messy yet intricate architectures of care and control. It can feel slow, even dehumanizing, but it also mirrors the way cells guard information, the way DNA verifies, delays, and duplicates to preserve life. I can’t help but imagine that our bureaucracies are themselves macroscale echoes of our biological logic: evolved, institutionalized, and still, at its core, a means of managing vulnerability.

This sonification composition is a meditation on those layered voices—individual, institutional, ancestral, biological. A reflection on the ethics of access and security, the beauty in constraint, and the strange, recursive music in-between the lines of messages.

Extended, immersive versions of this work may be combined with minimalist installation designs (a darkened room, with a single spotlight on an empty hardrive on plinth), with possible added interactivity (when the harddrive is physically approached too closely, the sonification is modulated, e.g. dampened or replaced with electrostatic noise, etc.)

Basic sonification design…