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Julian Day

I like how the work plays with exhibition tropes, such as the practice of relegating headphones to sound art pieces so that they remain discreet. Here the headphones are also receivers. We’re forced into an implicated position. You have to pick up one phone or another. You have to decide about time: how long will I stand and listen? It pivots on how we tend to consume media passively, in the gallery or more generally.

Kamari Carter

Absolutely. The duration of each line never exceeds two minutes and thirty seconds. Some people chose to listen to each loop consistently which was perhaps their way to digest the subject matter. One of the calls is a 27-year-old mother who strangles her two-year-old son then calls 911 to turn herself in. Another call is a five-year-old who notices that her father is having trouble breathing, she calls 911 and becomes this superhero. In both cases you only hear one side. So, you have the option to start or end with this beautiful endearment but the juxtaposition is short. There’s also a hierarchy in how you understand these narratives. Both invoke a desire to know more, to complete the circuit.

Julian Day

The choice you offer the listener is like a poisoned chalice. You can choose to listen to a fragment or to one or the other, but every option has emotional weight; a complexity and even a traumatic impact. There's also a kind of phantom logic at play. If you just hear one side of a conversation through one ear—the responder, for instance, or the person calling in—you start to mentally fill in the other half. That seems very potent, because you’re listening intently yet there's a glut of silence. Again, the listener is active, almost creating the content.

Kamari Carter

Absolutely. You have this audio proprioception, a kind of anamnesis where the expectation begins to form itself. You're so used to hearing 911 calls, whether in movies or TV or maybe something more personal, that you tend to fill out the narrative before you hear the other side. That's a critical component of the work and why it was so important that the listening be active, because everyone comes to the work with a different set of experiences.

Julian Day

And as with any artwork there are degrees of locality and positionality. You will hear this differently in Los Angeles than in New York, whether you've called 911 yourself or only heard of it in a Hollywood context. It makes me think about narrative. Using multiple telephones means offering multiple narratives, at a time when popular media suggests that we’re in “age of polarity,” in which morality is black or white. This work forces you, materially, to hear different, and perhaps conflicting, ways to read a situation.

Kamari Carter

Definitely. We live life linearly, but so much of life is nonlinear. Healing is nonlinear. Memory is nonlinear. Experience is nonlinear. So, I wanted to continue that thread sonically. It’s important that you can listen to the dispatcher and the little girl and the mother who strangles her son. While their situations are so separate, it’s not too much of a stretch to draw a connection between them. That’s just happenstance, an accident; there was no intentionality in the selection process. But in many ways, everything is interconnected. I wanted that to be part of the experience. The connective tissue between the four situations exists in a multitude of ways.

Julian Day

The work places us into a strong position of empathy. That’s a whole other dimension here: listening as attuning to and absorbing another person. We put this device close to our ear and hear someone in a life-or-death situation which acclimates us to their narrative intimately, whereas other forms of media, like watching it on YouTube, might distance us.

Kamari Carter

Yes, that was important. We as human beings—we're a little nosy. We want to know things, even things that perhaps we don't really want to know. Often it brings us joy to relate other people’s experiences to our own lives. It’s the intimacy of eavesdropping, of being removed enough that someone else is the protagonist or antagonist but close enough that you’re still involved. Keep in mind that I left in all the functionality of the phone. There is a speaker in the bottom end, so that when you breathe you hear yourself back. When the dispatcher tells you to “stay where you are; are there any weapons in the house?” it feels as though they’re talking to you. I wanted that level of intimacy to exist because it’s so much more palpable: you’re there, as a third party, in that space.

Julian Day

You mentioned eavesdropping and I’d like to draw this piece into your broader practice. You often play with ideas of eavesdropping, of surveillance, even the voyeuristic nature of these broadcast moments, whether it’s 911 calls, bodycam footage or megaphones. There’s something encoded in these materials that you can unlock and overhear; dropping into something that may have once been private but is destined to be public.

Kamari Carter

I’m trying to address institutional transparency. My 2017 installation Rear Sight uses megaphones installed in a gallery to emit local EMS and police radio. It’s not designed to spy on the police per se but to make clear which calls the police have and how they talk about the suspects and the victims. Which areas experience more surveillance or less and what does that say about their demographics? You can go to one part of the city and experience a heavy police presence then go around the corner where it feels like a newly moneyed utopia. There's very little transparency as to how that could happen. I want to act as a sonic and informational panopticon to help explain how surveillance either works for or against us.

Julian Day

It’s easy to forget that this footage is curated. When you see body cam footage on YouTube, for instance, you notice that at certain points the police have turned their cameras on and off. There's already been a process of curation before you reach the transparency you mention. So, our agency to listen and to respond is already constrained.

Kamari Carter

Yeah. Just as I make a multitude of decisions before a work is erected and shown it would be asinine to believe that similar decisions aren’t made when body cam footage or court proceedings are put out there. The unfortunate reality is that we see what certain people want us to see. I am hoping that by constantly probing that process, and remaining very aware, we can begin to make connections and see more transparency. But it's gonna take a long time.

Julian Day

There’s something about modern surveillance infrastructure, the endless cameras and recording devices institutionally dispersed through a city… You recently visited the UK which is one of the world’s most surveilled countries. Where do you stand on the extent of this state—sanctioned listening infrastructure?

Kamari Carter

I think that it's good where it's used well but, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely, right? If someone says “it's good that the state has your back”—well, has whose back? Depending on what you look like, what body you're in and how you move throughout the world the state might not have your back. That’s what I'm trying to point to. It's not that surveillance is inherently bad and we need to dismantle it. It's that it’s good up until a point and until that point we should talk about when it's not good, when it's used against us.

Julian Day

We can’t assume that the passive camera—or audio recording device—is this unblinking eye or ear of justice. It's going to reflect back the asymmetries it's surveying: the asymmetries of bodies, the asymmetries of the local. I’m thinking of other types of contemporary listening, for instance Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s “forensic listening” or even whistleblowing initiatives like WikiLeaks bringing otherwise secret material to public attention. What are the ethics of drawing out these very heightened emotional moments to a broader listenership? What do you think about the ethics of revealing, transforming or adapting this kind of material?

Kamari Carter

All I’m doing is taking something that was on the shelf behind other products and putting it in the front. Everything I used in the work is publicly available or public domain. The audio wasn’t sourced from a 911 dispatching agency; I didn't go into unauthorized archives. This is information and these are stories that have been written about across the United States. I gravitated towards specific audio because of their themes: of family, of pain, of anguish, mental health, trauma, turmoil. I have synthesized the materials but not to compromise anyone’s anonymity or plant a false flag. I'm simply foregrounding data that is behind a veil.

Julian Day

Well, certainly the installation version of the work is a form of narrow casting. You invite us to choose to listen; it's not a broadcast. That's one of the key points of your practice: you’re not going into secret spaces per se, you’re not filming inside the Pentagon. This is material that is already there to be heard. You’re simply holding up the mouthpiece—or the earpiece—to us.

Kamari Carter

Right.