Sounds of Life
sounds of life is an interactive web-archive calendar that juxtaposes the disturbing contrast between the comfortable normalcy of Jewish life in Israel and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza during September 2024.
Required to return to Israel for familial obligations after a two-year absence, I turned my visit into an opportunity to document Israeli society's unsettling ability to maintain a façade of ordinary existence while actively perpetrating atrocities.
Inspired by the story of Medo Halimi, a Gazan TikToker killed by an Israeli airstrike on his way to charge his phone just days before my arrival, I realized that the war was present even in my phone's ability to move around freely, charged, and 'hear' different soundscapes. In response, I developed sounds of life, a surveillance app installed on my phone, programmed to capture 18x10 second recordings four times a day, alluding to the Hebrew word 'chai' (חיx10) meaning life. This extended self-surveillance performance served as a reminder of my privileged life and proof of my survival in Israel while Gaza was bombarded, capturing sounds of undisturbed, everyday life in Israel amidst war.
Using the sounds recorded during my stay to expose the asymmetrical relationship between safety in Israel and constant threat in Gaza, I designed the calendar of remembrance website presenting two juxtaposing temporalities: the days of the month and the days since the Israeli-Hamas war began. Intentionally challenging to navigate, with a mostly invisible cursor, this calendar demands the user's effort to bear witness to its content. Clicking on a day of the month triggers a popup hosting the recordings captured on that day, while clicking on a day of the war opens a report detailing the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza and the resulting casualties. The website's interface mirrors the lopsided power dynamics at play, as the Gaza reports randomly obscure and disrupt the user’s access to the recordings from Israel, which nonetheless continue unabated once started—a haunting embodiment of Israel's ability to drown out and ignore Palestinian suffering.
After clicking once on the header text, twice on yellow numbers, and once on a timestamp in a popup triggered by a click on white/red dates, users are presented with an 'ENOUGH' button, endowing them with the ability to shatter the oppressive grid and momentarily access the calendar of hope, an alternate space where users have 18x10 fleeting seconds to replace the sounds and reports featured in the calendar of remembrance by inserting their own audio files and words, collectively imagining a future where Palestine is free and Israelis and Palestinians coexist as equals. Once the countdown reaches 0, the inputs are saved, and users are redirected to the calendar of remembrance. Constantly needing to return to the calendar of hope to realize the vision of a peaceful future suggests that such work demands sustained, collaborative effort, always keeping the painful past and present in sight while working towards a better tomorrow.
A meditation on the interdependence of past, present, and future as well as the interplay of memory, resistance, and hope, sounds of life grapples with the normalization of genocide, calls for bearing witness to injustice, and provides a forum for forging a path towards peace, equality, and reconciliation.