Lossless Transmissions: The Errant Earplugs (2023)
sound installation, earplugs in vitrine, three digital prints on canvas
17′ loop
Sound courtesy of the audio archives from the Linguistic Survey of India
Production Design: Merve Ertufan
Woodworking: Derek Shirley
Lossless Transmissions: The Errant Earplugs is part of an artistic inquiry that tunes into the audio archive of the Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), a mammoth colonial project to capture and record all languages and dialects of the subcontinent, spearheaded by Irish linguist George Grierson in early-twentieth-century South Asia. At the heart of this inquiry is a question: How can the act of listening invoke the inaudible traces in an archive?
Listening to the hisses, crackles, fuzz, and static of the aural records produces another resonant field that lends itself to an uncatalogued trail of stories and voices. Attending to uncanny sonics, hysterical-historical narrations get short-circuited across time and location—as is perhaps the case with the errant earplugs. This artifact, lost and found during a dig into the LSI archives, is presented as the core of a sound installation that asks visitors what they might (un)hear when approaching it, and what kind of listening it might demand.
