About the work /

Darija Medic

On the Air

Embrace data mining with a song+ monitor your loved ones in their online behavior. Become a song-poem writer and broadcast your opinions for free. This work is a Firefox add-on that keeps track of every key stroke in text input fields and when it registers a noticable pause in typing, the alluring voice of Google Translator reads out the letter, syllable, word, phrase, or other type of (ir)regular expression. Through acoustic space, the presence of someone's typing activity becomes experienced physically public and actualized. Using the typing field of the search engine as a field for expression of any kind challenges the nature of our relationships to search engines, creating noise within what is supposed to have meaning, and meaning through noise. The work was shown as a performative radio broadcast as a part of the Rebelhuis Speed show, but can be used in many ways.

The video jingle

I am what I type?

To perform with the add-on, connect an FM transmitter to the audio output of your computer. The 87.9 frequency is where we traditionally broadcast, but feel free to explore the spectrum!

All the content registered by the add-on gets stored in a text file, exponentially growing through time and usage, drawing a typescape of its users. The content never gets erased