KDZU: Static is the Structure

The Big White Dog roams the hallways after hours, paws clicking on the concrete. Have you seen it? The overenthusiastic vacuum cleaner occasionally starts itself during too-quiet moments, blasting white noise through the corridors of the twelfth floor. Is it screaming through the building right now? KDZU will be deploying its Dubplate Forensics Agent (DFA) to visualize the Reef’s collection of hauntologies, sightings, and stories of myth and malfunction that burrow, like chasmophytic roots, into the building’s most logical systems and etch the building’s foundation like the surface noise of a well-worn record.

In this performance and installation of KDZU’s "Static is the Structure," DJ Future Ghost (Rob Ray) conjures the translucent pop and crackle of augmented-reality-enhanced dub techno, provoking the invisible that lingers between the atoms of The Reef, a mid-century industrial building in Los Angeles that is the creative home of CultureHub LA.

During the residency, KDZU transmitted through “All Is Not Lost,” KDZU’s lone-wolf WiFi network that drifts through the building like a ghost frequency, carrying fragments of recordings, field notes, and transmissions from their ongoing investigations.

Through a workshop, participants also decoded KDZU’s tactical mythmaking, tracing how story, signal, and sound merge into acts of collective imagination and speculative design. Tactical mythmaking is KDZU’s method of using fiction as a coping infrastructure and a change agent, inventing and deploying myths to expose or complicate systems of power, technology, and communication.