It’s Not Your Place
Year of Creation:
2022
Media:
Song + Digital Collage
Dimensions:
Variable
Interaction Type:
Not Interactive
Duration:
3:10
Description:
A hybrid work of sound and image, It’s Not Your Place stages myth, authority, and distortion at the edge of expression. The digital collage presents a rocky plateau suspended in a cosmic void, where a centaur restrains or teaches a boy with a bow—an ambiguous pairing of guidance and coercion. To the right, a Madonna-like face is stretched into a funnel, caught between icon and distortion, while a flat gray monolith looms like an interface or portal. Earth floats in the distance, dwarfed by this mythic stage. The accompanying song uses only the artist’s voice, digitally manipulated into metallic textures, choral resonances, and guttural fragments. Its single lyric—“It’s not your place, mind your tongue”—cuts through as both command and critique. The piece channels the tension between self-expression and silencing, desire and discipline, myth and digital distortion, staging authority as both sacred and corrupted.
Core Question:
What happens to voice, desire, and myth when authority speaks only as distortion?
Loop Analysis
Structure:
Voice–Authority Feedback Loop
Definition:
A system where expression is produced and immediately refracted through the command of repression.
Leverage Point:
The recognition that authority, whether divine, cultural, or internalized, reshapes the self at the level of voice and image.
Inputs / Outputs:
Human voice → digital manipulation → distorted soundscape → listener’s perception of repression vs. resistance → recognition of authority’s shaping force
Effect:
Unease, confrontation, destabilization of voice and identity
Ethical Valence:
Critical and vulnerable—reveals how systems of authority warp expression, exposing repression as spectacle
Design Note:
By making every sound originate from the artist’s voice, the work collapses subject and system: the critique of silencing is performed through the very distortion of expression.
