Commissioned by Georges River Council for the exhibition Our Journeys | Our Stories in 2021, Divining Possible Pathways is comprised of a 3 metre drawing and sound installation that responds to the colour, wind, and water of Biddegal Country at Oatley Park and Carrs Bush Park in Sydney, and the stories of migrant Chinese people residing in the area. Sound feedback was generated using rock formations at Oatley Park and overlaid with recordings of water lapping the pier, people and wildlife.

2021 Divining Possible Pathways

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From the album 'Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity' , DDL out on LINE, 2025 
Vinly available via https://boomkat.com/products/muzak-for-the-encouragement-of-unproductivity

'Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity' is a poetic inversion of Muzak’s traditional role in stimulating seamless productivity in the workplace. Beginning as a pre-radio music distribution network (1934, U.S.), Muzak was transmitted along electrical wires with the intention of being at once ubiquitous and indiscernible, always present yet easily ignorable. As a pseudo-science the aim was to capitalize on the potential of music to have a psychological effect on listeners, and with the goal of maximum productivity, was employed as a sonic disciplinary force in the work place.

Previously installed for Dystopia Sound Art Biennial (2024), at the Amazon Packing Station located before HAUNT-Frontviews in Berlin, 'Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity' sonically addresses utopic notions of seamless, efficient productivity, inherent to capitalist cultures, and their very real dystopic effects from labour exploitation to the impacts of over-production on the environment. This poetic inversion, further developed as an album, is not meant as a kind of melodic control but rather a reflective space in which to consider the benefits personally, globally and environmentally, of slowing down.

Reverb, essential to the Muzak aesthetic, is programmed (using convolution reverb) with the dimensions of the Berlin Amazon fulfillment centre, DBE2. Amazon fulfillment centers are global contemporary factories, promising a consumer utopia of next day delivery of almost any product imaginable. Inspired by Sam Kidel’s concept of “mimetic hacking”(1), the reverberation characteristics of the DBE2 facility perform a symbolic sonic break-in to the guarded Amazon fulfillment center, a trespass to the flow of production

Muzak For the Encouragement of Unproductivity

Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity 3 (LINE/Boomkat Editions, 2025)

Sounding with women washing on the Li River. I activated the littoral space between mountains and water, by engaging with a site of women's labour which was entirely ignored by the Chinese shanshui (landscape) tradition.

2021 Divining Possible Pathways

CYZChen

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