(Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2024)
Behind Closed Doors is a lecture performance which explores the meaning of “private security” as a technology, industry and affect. The performance traces a sonic history of the home security alarm, from new conceptions of private property in the United States to the proliferation of gated suburbs for wealthy communities across the globe. Behind Closed Doors uses the theremin as an instrument and a signifier of the meeting point between private and public security. By looking into the history of Leon Theremin’s inventions, I demonstrate how Cold War politics shaped the progress of electronic music and electromagnetic alarm systems; technologies which protected both the Soviet state and centres of global capital, like New York City. Behind Closed Doors demonstrates the way in which sonic surveillance technologies like contemporary RFID (radio frequency identification) blur the boundary between private and public space.
Beneath this examination of sonic technology and its political manifestations is an analysis of what security means for different people, places and communities. Elaborating upon this keyword becomes the driving force of the piece, using the interaction between the performer’s corporality and the theremin as a case study to reveal the fragility of our personal encounters with surveillance. Choreographing my body alongside the lecture creates various vibrational frequencies, which become sound when the theremin is activated. In sonic terms, this also represents the notion of ‘alarming’: the way in which sounds alarm our bodies and vice versa. In electromagnetic surveillance we are not perceived visually, as by security cameras. Instead we are heard – the alarm hears us before we hear it. The electromagnetic sensor is an extension of the landlord or tenant’s body. As a performer, I interact with the theremin with fear and boldness, reflecting bodily encounters with surveillance. Sometimes we become acutely aware of electromagnetic security systems, avoiding them with our whole bodies, while on other occasions we cross thresholds of surveillance which are hidden and/or “inconsequential”. Our affective responses to alarms have also waned since the invention of these technologies; the sound of an alarm becomes quotidian and ignorable.
Recording Available Here.
