Museum Siam
a live audiovisual performance for CACHE Collective x Thai Tunes
Concept
The performance — entitled Resident Ecologies — is a work of speculative fiction, imagining a world in which the physical and sonic infrastructure of Bangkok are manipulated by a computer virus. Acting as a sort of computational “earworm”, the virus affects humans through visual and auditory stimulus and manipulation, with the ultimate side effect of reprogramming society into a mass trance-like and meditative state. The virus, the host, and the environment become one.
The piece is an attempt to sculpt a mind-bending ecology of place, with a particular emphasis on the mundane and non-anthropocentric aspects of life in Bangkok. A gecko, a cricket, a call to morning prayer, a sidewalk crossing — a handful elements of everyday life in Thailand are sampled, stretched, warped, bent, and shifted into a new audio+visual landscape. While the connotations of virology are often harmful and foreign, the resulting audio visual experience is rather a revelation of something inherent: the sequences, algorithms, and patterns that underlie the fabric of everyday life in this place.
It took place in front of and on the facade of Museum Siam, constructed in 1922 in Bangkok's historic Pranakhon district.
