AUDINT

AUDINT—an abbreviation of Audio Intelligence—is an audiovisual research collective whose work joins sound studies, installation, publishing, software and speculative fiction. A 2016 profile describes the group as publicly active since 2008 and identifies its practical field as the psychological and physiological effects of frequencies at the edges of audition (Steve Goodman/AUDINT/Secondary Sources/Texts/Articles/AUDINT-Wire-Article-Final.pdf, p. 1). By 2017 its listed members were Toby Heys, Steve Goodman, Souzanna Zamfe, Eleni Ikoniadou and Patrick Defasten, with animation, installation, records and books used as mutually reinforcing parts of one research-fiction (Steve Goodman/AUDINT/Secondary Sources/Texts/Articles/AUDINT-Creative-Applications-Interview.pdf, pp. 1–2).

Research cell and fiction apparatus

The collective investigates deceptive uses of frequency, military psychoacoustics, infrasound, ultrasound and the history of recording as a supposed channel between living and dead. It calls the weaponized production of spectral presence martial hauntology and the wider peripheral field unsound (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Editor/Steve_Goodman_Toby_Heys_Eleni_Ikoniadou_-_AUDINTUnsound_Undead-Urbanomic__2019.pdf, pp. xi–xiv, 1–3). Its installations extend this investigation beyond hearing: Upload=Delphic Panaceas, for example, combined archive fragments with smell, altered taste and wearable bass transducers in what the group termed a transmodal affective environment (Steve Goodman/AUDINT/Secondary Sources/Texts/Articles/AUDINT-Creative-Applications-Interview.pdf, p. 4).

AUDINT presents itself not simply as a contemporary collective but as the latest personnel wave of a clandestine unit founded after the Second World War. Its internal chronology passes through four phases: the Ghost Army, Wandering Soul, Phantom Hailer and Ghostcode. Each phase connects a documented military technique—battlefield deception, propaganda tapes, directional sound or holography—to invented operatives, devices and artificial intelligences (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Editor/Steve_Goodman_Toby_Heys_Eleni_Ikoniadou_-_AUDINTUnsound_Undead-Urbanomic__2019.pdf, pp. xi–xiv). The Dead Record Archive supplies the narrative's connective tissue: annotated reverse record sleeves link patents, people, weapons, recordings and hallucinations into a database that is at once artwork, research method and prop (Steve Goodman/AUDINT/Secondary Sources/Texts/Articles/AUDINT-Wire-Article-Final.pdf, pp. 2–3).

Works and methods

The 2014 box set Martial Hauntology combined vinyl narratives, a book and archive cards; Dead Record Office staged related material as a record-store graveyard; and Delusions of the Living Dead organized a film around Cotard syndrome and the belief that one is dead or lacks bodily organs (Steve Goodman/AUDINT/Secondary Sources/Texts/Articles/AUDINT-Creative-Applications-Interview.pdf, pp. 3–4). The later GHOSTCODE project projected the archive into a 2056 of corporate nations and weaponized holographic artificial intelligences (Steve Goodman/AUDINT/Secondary Sources/Texts/Articles/AUDINT-Creative-Applications-Interview.pdf, p. 5).

The fiction also operates technically. In 2011 AUDINT used its Ghostcoder software to hide speech several octaves above ordinary hearing inside high-resolution music files distributed as apparently familiar recordings; a spectrogram and the same software could recover the encoded material (Steve Goodman/AUDINT/Secondary Sources/Texts/Articles/AUDINT-Wire-Article-Final.pdf, pp. 3–4). This is hyperstition as media procedure: the archive does not ask only whether a story is true, but constructs files, interfaces and embodied situations through which the story acts.

Archive objects: lecture, software, public library

The archive does not preserve AUDINT only as a written mythology. The Colorcoder README documents a functioning sound application that samples hue, saturation and brightness from Ellsworth Kelly's Colors for a Large Wall, converts the sampled hue into a scaled audible frequency, and allows up to eight octaves to be layered while the user moves through the image by mouse, grid, bounce, horizontal or vertical paths (Steve Goodman/AUDINT/Software/AUDINT - Colorcoder_README.pdf, pp. 1–2). The document explicitly calls the application “creative software” rather than commercial software and supplies operating limits and a BSD binary-distribution licence (Steve Goodman/AUDINT/Software/AUDINT - Colorcoder_README.pdf, pp. 2–3). These are documented interface and distribution facts; the README's account of coded wartime messages in Kelly's paintings remains part of AUDINT's internal fiction unless independently verified.

The archived CTM lecture supplies a second kind of witness: a public explanation and demonstration. The recording calls GhostCoder a way of creating an online “spectral archive”, then describes hiding speech in the ultrasonic range of lossless music files and recovering it by pitching the concealed material downward (Steve Goodman/AUDINT/Audio/CTM 2012 – Invisible Attacks and Hideouts – Lecture by AUDiNT.mp3, 49:59–51:58) speaker unattributed. Later, the recording describes BitTorrent circulation as a way for the encoded archive to become a public library passed among music listeners (Steve Goodman/AUDINT/Audio/CTM 2012 – Invisible Attacks and Hideouts – Lecture by AUDiNT.mp3, 53:29–54:17) speaker unattributed. The lecture directly documents what AUDINT presented and demonstrated in that event; it does not independently prove the clandestine chronology embedded in the presentation.

CONTRADICTION AUDINT's internal report dates the unit to 1945 and treats IREX2, Eduard Schüller and the TwoRing table as institutional history (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Editor/Steve_Goodman_Toby_Heys_Eleni_Ikoniadou_-_AUDINTUnsound_Undead-Urbanomic__2019.pdf, pp. xi–xiv). External profiles instead date the publicly active collective to 2008 and explicitly describe its earlier history as an elaborate transmedia mythology (Steve Goodman/AUDINT/Secondary Sources/Texts/Articles/AUDINT-Wire-Article-Final.pdf, pp. 1–2; Steve Goodman/AUDINT/Secondary Sources/Texts/Articles/AUDINT-Creative-Applications-Interview.pdf, p. 2). Claims about the clandestine unit are therefore part of the artwork unless independently documented unverified. The 2016 profile also names Patrick Doan where the 2017 account names Patrick Defasten; the archive does not establish whether these are aliases or different participants unverified.