Mitchell Akiyama, Torture | 2010 | 3min | Sound Immersion | Canada
“If the Iraqis aren’t used to freedom, then I’m glad to be part of their exposure. We’ve been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?” – James Hetfield, Metallica
From 2002 until at least mid-2006 detainees at American military prisons were subjected to a surreal and disturbing interrogation technique. In addition to enduring days of sleep deprivation brought on by bright lights and stress positions, in addition to being forced to perform degrading theatrics such as those caught on camera at Abu Ghraib, prisoners were made to suffer sonic onslaughts of American popular music. This technique was a part of the military’s “no-touch torture” strategy, a tactic intended to disorient and ultimately break detainees without leaving physical marks. This was a form of coercion that transcended the realm of the physical; for many Muslim detainees, the very act of listening to music forced them into a constant state of sin.
In 2008, the left-wing news organization Mother Jones published its “torture playlist,” a partial inventory of music that has reportedly been used to interrogate prisoners. Torture is the brutal collision of these songs. Deformed and distorted, it attempts to imagine the sound of the American hit parade from the perspective of a detainee. Torture distills and amplifies the qualities that would make this music a weapon in the war on violent extremism. It is a composite— the un-soundtrack of sonic terror.
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Mitchell Akiyama divides his time between Toronto and Montreal. He has been an active presence in Canadian and international electronic music and media arts circles for a decade. Akiyama has performed and exhibited throughout North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia in galleries, festivals, and run-down dive bars, the likes of which include the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, the Sonar festival in Barcelona, the Mutek festival in Montreal, and a former fallout bunker in the post-Soviet squalor of Opava, Czech Republic.
Akiyama’s work is eclectic but tends to be concerned with the material and sensual qualities of communications and media technologies. Akiyama’s sound art often exploits digital errors and embraces the aesthetics of the media in which he works. While recording media are often tacitly accepted as windows onto the world, Akiyama’s focuses on the pane, the medium itself, that separates subject from object. His video and installation work is similarly focused on materiality. Akiyama’s work questions how and what it is that we represent with media; how does media prey upon memories, parasitically displacing embodied experience with representations? Akiyama’s media interventions seek to reveal the artificiality as well as the suchness and inescapable presence of media.
