Click here to play emergency alert + venetian bells remix
The test of San Francisco’s emergency outdoor alert system which is broadcast on public PA’s every Tuesday at noon has had new residents and visitors alarmed and long term San Franciscans alternately jerked to a state of orange alert or noting the fleeting weeks of their lives. Sampling, layering and manipulating the Tuesday alert test along with the ringing bells of the Venetian Basilica of San Marco, the audio mélange, contrasts or conflates the call to prayer or the call to awareness or alertness with the authoritative summons from a civic power apparatus. Having been played at noon in Union Square, San Francisco and at a Capitalism Is Over! If You Want It event, when listening to the work, the hope is that it could transform our weekly fight or flight response into bemusement or a re-assessment of our national security state.