Heys, T.E.B., Goodman, S., 2017.

Delphic Panaceas

Commissioned by Istanbul's prestigious Zorlu Center, Delphic Panaceas is a transmedia exhibition incorporating films, cassettes, digital prints and multi-sensory experience. Its research imperative traced the lineage of, and analysed, critical shifts in frequency-based deception techniques deployed by military organisations from WW2 until 2017's ultrasonic/infrasonic attacks at Havana's US embassy. The project was underpinned by the research question - how art exhibitions can create new languages around classified military histories? The research is grounded in and creates original knowledge in the field of sound studies, responding specifically to histories of listening and sonic affect authored by McGill University's Professor Jonathan Sterne and Goldsmith's Julian Henriques. Delphic Panaceas probes the veracity of such techniques when assimilated and redeployed for covert military operations in civil and war-torn contexts. Stringent criteria were developed for the research methods by conducting in-depth e-mail interviews with prominent ex-military psychological operations personnel such as Sergeant Major Herbert Friedman. He supplied compelling testimony concerning strategies in WW2 and Vietnam, which was compared with documented accounts from the British Library and Library of Congress (USA) to reveal the differences of on-the-ground experiences. In Turkey, where internal and border conflict is commonplace, public debate concerning military strategies is prevented by the current government. This means that exhibitions such as Delphic Panaceas offer significant catalytic opportunities for academics, writers, and political activists to share ideas. This was further confirmed by newspaper reports covering it. In a wider context the research's significance becomes pertinent in light of increasingly authoritarian government's stances against discourses criticising military techniques. Spanning a 4-year period of quantitative and qualitative research the results formed an archive that instigated original theory fiction narratives.. The installation was produced under the collaborative AUDINT moniker of which I am a founder but all work is mine except one side of each cassette, which Steve Goodman produced.