Other Registers - sound installation
Projects 2018-04-10
Summary:
Other Registers: The Sound and Silence of Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro
Other Registers is an immersive sound installation which deals critically with the impact of police violence in the period in which our city is receiving international attention due to the Olympics. Created with public security data, a soundscape is the focal point of the work, accompanied by a model of a caveirão (a type of armoured personnel carrier used by the military police in Rio), symbolically turning an instrument of violence into a musical instrument.
Other Registers is an immersive sound installation that uses specialist software to transform official quantitative data about police violence in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, into sound in a process called “sonification”. You are invited to experience the data, played as sound via eight loudspeakers arranged in a circle.
The sound you will hear comprises three different layers. A constant “drone” sound represents civilian deaths, mapped onto the four geographical regions of Rio, and combined with data for the city as a whole. The second layer is a bell-like sound, which juxtaposes the data on police and civilian deaths to create a kind of melody. Finally, the sonification of civilian and police deaths is also mixed with a third element, the sound of a human voice reading aloud newspaper headlines relating to police violence. The different sound sources move around the circle created by the speakers, at different speeds and in different directions, as an additional way of making the data meaningful.
The outline drawing on the floor is inspired by the caveirão, or “big skull”, the name given to the armoured vehicle used by Rio’s police forces in the city’s favelas. The caveirão was a key source of inspiration for the installation, because its construction includes loudspeakers which often play loud music during operations.
Police violence is a long-standing issue in Rio de Janeiro, and the statistics for deaths resulting from police operations in the city are shocking. As Amnesty International has pointed out, this violence disproportionally affects young black men, especially those living in the city’s favelas. The high numbers of killings of civilians by the police are often tolerated by Brazilian society, in general. Members of the police forces are also killed whilst on duty.
In the spreadsheets produced by Rio’s Institute of Public Security, which were the data source for the installation, statistics about deaths resulting from police operations appear in a section with the title “Other Registers”, as if they were somehow insignificant, or less important than the rest. By giving this title to the installation, and putting the data on police violence at its centre, we aim to highlight the meaning of these statistics through a technological and abstract experience.
The installation uses data relating to a key period in Rio’s recent history, from October 2009, when the city was selected as the host for the 2016 Olympic Games, to January 2016, as the Olympic year began.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T0yaxbltNQ&feature=youtu.be
Artist-researcher Samuel van Ransbeeck
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/samuel-van-ransbeeck
CREDITS (Belfast Staging 2018)
Other Registers was developed collaboratively by Brazil and UK-based artists and researchers as part of the Creative Lab on Social Change through Creativity and Culture – Brazil (2015-2016), coordinated by People’s Palace Projects and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Newton Fund.
Original concept & implementation: Nicolas Espinoza, Tori Holmes, Rafael Puetter (Rafucko), Samuel van Ransbeeck; Guga Ferraz (artwork).
Technical specificaitons: