Art, Production Design, Experiential, Creative Services

Back Light Compensation is an experimental sound piece originally recorded with a zoom mic and a vocal mic picking up radio frequencies through a guitar amp. It is a short ode to the Fluxus movement in process, and means to create a soundscape that tells the dark narrative of mass surveillance and fear in an increasingly panopticon-like society. 

Through signal processing in Adobe Audition and Audacity, the recorded sounds are transformed with attention to wetness, delay rate, delay time, modulation depth and levels, phasing and Chorus, topped with a garnish of panning-automation and/or stereo phasing and then Paulstretched. 

​

Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

"The US government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has engaged in massive, illegal dragnet surveillance of the domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001. Since this was first reported on by the press and discovered by the public in late 2005, EFF has been at the forefront of the effort to stop it and bring government surveillance programs back within the law and the Constitution.

 

News reports in December 2005 first revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting Americans’ phone calls and Internet communications. Those news reports, combined with a USA Today story in May 2006 and the statements of several members of Congress, revealed that the NSA is also receiving wholesale copies of American's telephone and other communications records. All of these surveillance activities are in violation of the privacy safeguards established by Congress and the US Constitution.

 

In early 2006, EFF obtained whistleblower from former AT&T technician Mark Klein showing that AT&T is cooperating with the illegal surveillance. The undisputed documents show that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails web browsing and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers and provides those copies to the NSA. This copying includes both domestic and international Internet activities of AT&T customers. As one expert observed, “this isn’t a wiretap, it’s a country-tap.”"