The Voice of Silence

Video, 2020

The explosion images are from news photos of Iran and the United States. For example, Demonstrators in Iraq burn items representing the U.S. flag in Baghdad; Iraqi faction backed by Iran damages the outskirts of the US embassy; images of explosions in factories or parking lots.

The narration came from John Cage's "Speaking About None." I let Google automatically translate the Chinese version of sentences, then Google girl read this out for me. Obviously, the result I got is different from the original English version. It’s hard to be perfect when artificial intelligence deals with translation between languages. Because they can only explain the meaning of sentences. In the dialogue between Iran and the United States, there are only benefits. I can't hear crying here, only silence.

Original Text：
I liked being in the side of the underdog. I got police per-mission to play sirens. The most amazing noise I ever found was that produced by means of a coil of wire attached to the pickup arm of the phonograph and then amplified. It was shocking, really shocking, and thunderous. Half intellectually and half sentimentally, when the war came a-long, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society.