Daght Jawi : a live-audiovisual essay
by Lawrence Abu Hamdan
1st oct. at 4pm
2 oct. at 4pm
Planétarium - Cité des Sciences
Artist : Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Artist assistant : Dhia Dhibi
Video Operator : Nabla Yahya
Sound designer : Moe Choucair
Initially commissioned by the Mousounturn, Frankfurt and Ashkal Alwan Beirut. Further support for this research came generously from the ARS Art-Research-Sound, a research project led by Prof. Peter Kiefer at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
Video
From May 2020 - to May 2021 Abu Hamdan kept a comprehensive diary of the sky above Lebanon. During that time he collected and filmed over 400 video recordings of Israeli fighter jets and unmanned aerial vehicles. The chronological presentation of this roaring sky, together with live audio processing, becomes the basis for a performance about background noise and atmospheres of violence.
Through this one essay the sky is continually recast, moving fluidly between menacing and pleasant, limitless and occupied, forgettable and fatal. Brian Eno's description of background music is that it should be as "ignorable as it is interesting." By effectively utilizing the unique acoustic and architectural qualities of the planetarium numerique this performance exposes us to a sonic warfare that sits somewhere in the background, a violence that is as ignorable as it is lethal.