Pan-terrestrial People’s Anthem (2018)
Pan-terrestrial People’s Anthem is a series of music compositions, videos and a book of poetry created entirely from remixing the songs and lyrics of 195 national anthems. The music is constructed from sampling fragments of all anthems to build up an assemblage of sonic layers that transcend established geopolitical boundaries. The book of poems is divided into five sections, each part takes a different conceptual and stylistic approach using constraint systems to combine and filter the 27, 523 words from all of the anthems.
To listen/view all of the audio and videos or order the book of poetry please visit the Contour Editions website. Below are samples of some of the imagery, videos, music and poems.
Pan-terrestrial People’s Anthem - track 3
This poem is created from a sampling of last lines of anthem lyrics from the database and is combined with the last two notes of music from dozens of the anthems. The visuals are algorithmically generated flags from random selections of flags from each of the countries.
The poetry in the book is created with multiple constraint systems, sets of aesthetic rules applied in an artistic context, to generate the artwork. For instance, some poems are built from querying search terms in the database of over 4,600 lines of anthem lyrics on topics like ‘navigation’, ‘time’, ‘sound’ and combining lyrics from different songs by topic.
In other instances, the entire database of words is broken up by word length (one character words, two-character words, three-character words, etc.) and reorganized as snowball poems that grow from one to ten letter word phrases creating lyrics for a new hybrid anthem not centered on any one country.
The book features multiple snowball poems where the entire database of words is broken up by word length (one character words, two-character words, three-character words, etc.) and reorganized as snowball poems that grow from one to ten letter word phrases creating lyrics for a new hybrid anthem not centered on any one country. Below there are two animations of snowball poems from the book.
For this track vocalist Ami Yamasaki interprets one of the snowball poems from the book comprised of anthem lyrics. The audio track is a 4-channel sound composition formatted to ambisonics audio, pan the 360º sound by moving the video image left and right.
This poem is made from a search of over 4,000 lines of the anthems for lines that contain the word ‘it’. For each line that is returned, one additional word is kept and all the other words are erased while keeping the spacing intact.
Pan-terrestrial People’s Anthem installation view with book attached to monitor at the Katonah Museum in the exhibition titled Signal curated by Lumi Tan.