Rarest Commodity.

Ange Leccia, La Mer, 1991 (via H I C E T N U N C).

Silence is one of contemporary info culture's rarest commodities. In a world where there are several thousand satellites in the sky constantly beaming down at us information, cell phone relays, GPS signals, and weather patterns, even the idea of light pollution takes on a more than metaphorical value. We see the lights in the sky, but we don't hear the frequencies beaming through every nook and cranny of a world put in parentheses by human-made objects in the sky. It's a different sentence, to say the least, when nature and nurture blur to the extent that they have over the last century, and we've created a new syntax of human culture, as our inability to find another "intelligent species" in the universe attests - we speak only to ourselves, so far - we're alone in the universe. That's the current info-culture scenario. We speak to ourselves because that's what lonely people do sometimes. If the metaphor of architecture and frozen music evokes structure, then I need to update the phrase, give it a spin, and see what pops out of the centrifuge - after all, if there's one thing Sound Unbound is about, it's the remix - it's a sampling machine where any sound can be you, and all text is only a tenuous claim to the idea of individual creativity. It's the plagiarist's club for the famished souls of a geography of now-here. Get my drift?

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, In Through the Out Door: Sampling and the Creative Act in Sound Unbound, The MIT Press, 2008, p.5.