Radikal Karaoke

"In Radikal Karaoke, Argentine-Spanish artist Belén Gache critiques the creation and proliferation of political speech. Through her interactive ventriloquism in this online, webcam-enabled interface, she satirizes the empty and seemingly endless stream of political rhetoric by transforming it into karaoke. The interface offers a number of visual and auditory effects that respond to aesthetic and performative alterations, ranging from a wildly-applauding audience to a looped video of a bomb explosion (and subsequent mushroom cloud) to a looped clip from an old school science fiction film. 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.' The speeches are a combination of text found by bots scraping the internet and political texts. Radikal Karaoke mocks how politicians use propaganda to impose authoritarian rule through an excess of linguistic nonsense and over-saturation of media space. Gache trivializes hegemonic political discourses by placing them into karaoke format, while focusing the reader's attention on the text." -- from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Three