AwakenedSilence is a retrofitted contemporary remake of Ant Farm’s 1975 Media Burn, a film satirizing the media and the impact of television by setting a stacked wall of television sets ablaze and then driving through it at full speed with a 1959 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz. Make no mistake: AwakenedSilence unswervingly barrels forward like-mindedly as a publicity stunt, media event, and cultural experiment. Drawing on the long-standing traditions of architecture to engage in dialogue with the art world, the project appropriates techniques of performance, installation, and film to embrace the ubiquitous nature of technology and reveal humanity’s fixed relationship to it.
Hundreds of UNC Charlotte participants turned off their cell phones for a day then filmed its awakening; the results have been compiled into a projected performance of darkness and silence gradually awakened by a crescendo of light and sound. This performance is one of series of events intended to ignite discussion during the Dense Emptiness Symposium on March 26.