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WHISPER. Status Code : No Entity Found
4’49”
2016
Sylvia Eckermann: sound
Gerald Nestler: words
 
WHISPER. Status Code : No Entity Found exposes the libidinal power of technocapitalism. In Gerald Nestler’s lyrics, the market/capital addresses us directly. Its seductive speech is set to rhythm and sound by Sylvia Eckermann. Computer voices strike up the digital hip hop of capitalized futures. Volatile swings define the auditive imagery. We are the derivative object of a bottomless desire, feeding its appetite for data beings. Constantly recalibrating a performative speech, its biopower constitutes the “recombinant social DNA” of the body politic. “Oh baby! How you nourish me!”
Sylvia Eckermann and Gerald Nestler’s work WHISPER. Status Code: No Entity Found imagines what capital – the epitome of abstraction – might sound like: beat arrangements surge and subside in cycles; a chorus of post-human voices provides the text-to-speech vocals, as capital, in a talkative moment, raps: “You drink me and drown / Oh you eat me and choke / For it’s you I digest / for it’s you in whom I invest / Oh baby how you nourish me!” The lyrics of this ode to self are laced with aggressively grandiose punch lines whose subtext drives home, in mantra-like repetition, the unchanging shibboleth: “Live in my shelter or your world shall go bust.”
There is no alternative, the future – formerly an anchor point for utopian hopes – is already cashed in. Literally: What speaks to us in Whisper is an economy whose creation of value is founded on speculation – wagers on the future that grow ever more fantastic and reckless: “At the surf of all your human desires – in your future I trust.”
However much Whisper’s capital tries to come across as a hardnosed and worldlywise trickster, it is (and will always be) a dreamer at heart, dreaming of life in a future of unlimited marketing opportunities, profit potentials, and the socialization of debts, its utopianism outshining even the confidence of the most committed socialist: “Some say: I’m running on empty, uncovered / And that it’s a crime. / My lifespan is but a quarter / and my value is worth a dime.” No matter – Whisper is the deviant, pretentious litany of an undead, capitalist realism as a HipHop-track.
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