Edition #001 – SHUSH Tones

Panke.gallery’s first edition features artist Claire Tolan with her work SHUSH Tones, a series of system sounds and ringtones for iOS and Android.

For this edition Claire Tolan produced EXCLUSIVE sets of new SHUSH TONES: SHUSH Basilisk – Truth To SHUSH – Bayesian SHUSH – Rare Earth Tones – SHUSH Vuln – SHUSH Yoke

“SHUSH Tones were created by SHUSH SYSTEMS in the early autumn of 2015. SHUSH SYSTEMS predicts SHUSH, a nascent fork of ASMR, and develops strategies for the deployment of SHUSH upon its arrival in our world. SHUSH will come as an answer to the crippling sublime that the individual experiences in the face of complex, planetary-scale systems – climate (and its change), finance, computing. SHUSH will rebase our megastructures, refactor our systems, and reformat our consciousnesses. SHUSH demands the end of this world and the inauguration of the next one. And yet, for now, there it remains, hanging on the horizon, always approaching but never arriving, crystalised as a to-come. SHUSH is left-behind even as it becomes later and later for its scheduled appointment. What is up with SHUSH? We appreciate your feedback as together we await SHUSH-to-come. You can reach us by mailing HUSH at sign SHUSH dot sign SYSTEMS.” (from the website’s description)

In the work SHUSH Tones, Claire Tolan infiltrates the mobile devices of her audience with a series of ringtones that are available exclusively as panke.gallery’s Edition #001. The mobile phones that are ubiquitous our daily lives become vessels for Tolan’s ongoing experiments with ASMR. The resulting tones disrupt everyday situations in an uncanny and often irritating way. Through this artistic intervention, Tolan explores the vulnerability of technical systems. With /SHUSH Tones/ she uses the YouTube phenomenon of ASMR and its subversive power to point to the threatening aspects of the mobile devices we use every day. She thus addresses the surveillance and control by multinational corporations and governmental agencies and how it extends into our private lives. Ringtones, long used to signal brand-allegiances or personal pop preferences, here receive a critical reinterpretation. What results opens up creative and empowering possibilities in one of mass culture’s dead zones — the under-attended space of the alert.

Panke.gallery’s first edition cover and inlay was designed by Anna-Luise Lorenz and Ingmar Spiller.

Claire Tolan's Shush Tones – panke.gallery's edition #001 – was featured in Neural, the magazine of critical digital culture and media arts:

“(...) the collective doesn’t ignore to chance to spread the main contents of the work, which are full of contemporary creativity and are meticulously organized by Claire Tolan. Digital activism, net art and club culture are the focus of the electronic crew, who thinks of these editions as a way to support the artists and the continuous gallery projects.”
— Read the full article on neural.it.