radia # 1113

FOSSIL///NOISE by Fabiana Gibim

An archive on the regulatory sense offers two shapes to live in: the grid, discrete, indexed, metric, the space of the catalogue and the timestamp, where everything has a slot and a slot has everything, or the flow, smooth, continuous, borderless, the space of the algorithm that sorts by resemblance instead of by rule. The flow looks like an escape from the grid. It works instead as the grid’s next form. Control doesn’t need walls once it can modulate a stream. Smoothness rarely means freedom: it works as surveillance without edges. A technofossil, though, doesn’t live in either shape. It lives in the escape of a different dimension from them, a fugitive geography. Between any two points in an archive there are always more points, mysterious, semiopen parts that are somehow both separable and inseparable from their neighbors, a texture that is neither cleanly cut nor cleanly continuous. This is a mereotopology. A technofossil can then be a fragment that stays a fragment no matter which classification tries to absorb it. It works less like debris than like a lure. A technofossil behaves the way a living fossil like the Arctic lamprey hunts, offering part of itself as bait, a tongue that wiggles like prey, close enough to something known to be pulled in and named, then slipping the catch just as recognition closes over it, a catastrophe of recognition that keeps recurring. Fugitiveness works this way too, staying legible only to itself, moving in ways the archive’s capturing apparatus hasn’t learned to follow yet.

What makes this geography fugitive, rather than simply unmapped, is that the archive’s own attempt at closure produces it, from inside its own edges. Any finite set of rules, any index, any algorithm, any catalogue, throws off a remainder it cannot account for, an incompressible residue generated by the very act of trying to make the archive total. A technofossil behaves the same way a transmission behaves once it has outlived the station that sent it, an archive of doom still propagating after the system that made it has closed the file. It persisted, migrated onto substrates nobody built for it, the way certain organisms take a bomb crater or a subculture takes root in the wreckage of a project that already failed, an ecology of distortion. It can also work as an archive of the hypothetical, a wrong prediction still waiting in the record for a chance to act on the present again.

In an attempt to scavenge a technofossil in this mix, nothing is mourned back into coherence. It stays inhabited in its ruined form, activated at the exact pitch of its distortion, an affection for destruction, that distortion is still carrying a charge.

Here, we are interested in the incomputable residue that any act of transmission, capture, or archiving throws off, and in treating that residue as the actual terrain worth mapping. An archive that fully accounts for everything it holds has stopped being strange to itself. Fossil///Noise is built from the technofossils it can’t hold, the fragments left over once the filing is done.

Samples include:

André Damião – Deumaestrutura (from NARVA2) — 2022

Merzboom – un till ed #002 – The Nightmare Continues — 2024

Yuri Bruscky – Trava-Língua nº 3 — 2023

W. Halliday – Arctic Noise (WCS Canada Ice Sounds) — n.d.

W. Halliday – Fish Grunt Sachs — 2015

W. Halliday – Bearded Seal — 2016

God Pussy – Raízes em Transe (from Diáspora: Expressão Ancestral) — 2023

God Pussy – Contos de Sinhá (from Diáspora: Expressão Ancestral) — 2023

Jesse Paul Miller – Sounds of Secret Records — 1995/1998

Martín Rodríguez – Des Cloches À La Solidarité / Une Grande Onde, Entre Temps Perdus (Transmission Ecologies Ep.14) — 2022

Sbjtvo – Isla decepción (title track) — 2020

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Sonic Psychogeographies II — 2025

Ajítẹnà – Chuva (from Habitar as coisas) — 2023

Jordan Belson & Stephen Beck – Cycles — 1974

Len Lye (film) / Andrew Pask (soundtrack) – Tusalava — 2008

Takashi Ito – Thunder — 1982

Amy Ireland – Cultivating Darkness — n.d.

Class Divide (dir. Simon James) – Neolithic Cannibals Soundscape — 2024

Reza Negarestani – On the Practical Necessity of Having Demons (Session 4) — n.d.

Sadie Plant – Where to with Cyberfeminism (CTM 2014) — 2014

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DIE ZWEITE HÄLFTE

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radia # 954

954: Conversations with My Deepfake Dad: Conversation One by Sarah Sweeney

Sarah Sweeney’s father died when he was forty-four and she was seventeen. When Sweeney turned forty-four, she wanted to talk to him again. She contacted Resemble AI, a company that creates clones of voices using machine learning, and they worked together to create an AI model of her father’s voice. When this model was completed Sweeney was able to type and speak words into the interface and hear him speak. Conversations with My Deepfake Dad is a series of six conversations created through Sweeney’s interactions with this audio deepfake of her father.

Sarah Sweeney received her BA in Studio Art from Williams College and an MFA in Digital Media from Columbia University School of the Arts and is

currently Associate Professor of Art at Skidmore College. She is the creator of The Forgetting Machine, an iPhone app commissioned by the new media organization Rhizome. Her work has appeared nationally and

internationally in exhibitions at locations including the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the New Jersey State Museum, the Black and White Gallery, and the UCR/California Photography Museum. Sweeney is a 2023 Wave Farm Media Arts Assistance Fund for Artists grantee for her project Conversations with My Deepfake Dad. https://www.sarahelizabethsweeney.com/