Radikal Karaoke | D9 ELMCIP

Radikal Karaoke is an online device intended to allow any user to deliver political speeches. Politics worldwide is almost exclusively devoted to rhetoric and speeches are structured on emphatic and demagogic formulae, linguistic clichés that reproduce themselves as viruses.

By mechanically repeating slogans we have turned ourselves into an automated society. It is not we who speak, but others that speak through us. Radikal Karaoke aims to interrogate hegemonic discourses. It contrasts the desire for utopia and the everyday, revolutionary spirit and scam.

Description (in original language)

Radical Karaoke consiste en un dispositivo online cuya finalidad es permitir que cualquier usuario pueda enunciar discursos políticos.
La política, a nivel mundial, se dedica hoy casi exclusivamente a la retórica. Sus discursos se estructuran en base a fórmulas enfáticas y demagógicas, sin contenidos específicos. Su función principal parece ser la de crear clichés lingüísticos cuya única meta, al igual que los virus, es repetirse a sí mismos. El obligado uso del teleprompter en los discursos políticos remite, además, al fenómeno del ventrilocuismo y el karaoke.

Description in original language

Spanish (Castilian)

Pull Quotes

In Radikal Karaoke, Argentine-Spanish artist Belén Gache critiques the creation and proliferation of political speech.

When readers allow Flash to access the microphone, they are instructed to “Choose a speech, read and interpret what they have written for you, considering that the sound of your voice can change the image of the screen.”

Screen shots