We were given a lecture on six possible titles we can use for our Unit Three projects. These include ‘the future of’: play, work, body, mind, travel and home. After some initial research on the titles, I worked out that I am most interested in the future of mind and the future of body.

One of the artists that was mentioned was Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Abu Hamdan produced an acoustic investigation into the Syrian prison Saydnaya. Over 16 000 people have been executed there since 2011. No visitors are allowed inside the prison, so the on record of what it is like there is what we can find out from people who have been let out from the prison itself. Furthermore, the prisoners were kept in darkness or had their eyes covered, so we only know what the prison sounded like.

The piece above is a visual representation of a sound piece that is played in the room from a soundbox that autonomously changes in response to the voices in the room. The lightbox shows (from left to right) the sound of a voice talking at a normal volume, the level at which one could speak at Saydnaya before the 2011 protests and the level at which one could speak after the protests. There is a nineteen decibel drop from the beginning to the end of this sound piece.