DANE MITCHELL AND NTS RADIO PRESENT POST HOC: AN AUDIO ARTWORK BY DANE MITCHELL BROADCAST DAILY ON NTS.LIVE
July 31, 2021
NTS radio presents Post hoc: an audio artwork by Dane Mitchell broadcast daily on NTS.LIVE to start July 31st. Post hoc is a new daily morning show on NTS and a project for radio by Aotearoa New Zealand-based artist Dane Mitchell. Post hoc is a spoken word list of vanishings, extinctions and disappearances which NTS listeners can tune in to for an hour a day, seven days a week, starting July 31st 2021. Post hoc will wash over the NTS airwaves every day at 10 pm PST/6 am BST / 5 pm NZST. Akin to the ritual of the 161-year-long broadcast of the shipping forecast, this vast tomb of things that our present sits on top of might be considered a forecast of the past. Post hoc is an inventory of loss in the form of an unfathomably long list, read by an artificial intelligence entity named ‘Amy’. The vast list spans an almost incomprehensible range of subjects:
missing artworks; extinct sign languages; lost bodies of water; discontinued newspapers; banned and withdrawn pharmaceuticals; chimerical, forbidden or impossible colors; extinct plants; lost films; previously recognized constellations; destroyed comets; banned aroma molecules; defunct electronic trading platforms; historical currencies closed nuclear facilities; disappeared sounds; failed banks; black holes; silent radio stations; prehistoric mammals; sinkholes; cured diseases; former national anthems; tax havens; extinct birds; destroyed monuments; recessions; discontinued photographic film; dinosaurs; disbanded political parties; censored exhibitions; secret societies; supernova...
Dane Mitchell’s Post hoc conjures the ghosts of our past, calling up millions of lost, extinct, and obsolete things. From submerged atolls to failed utopias, extinct languages to tax havens, long lists of lost entities are announced within an echo-free chamber and transmitted to cell phone towers disguised as trees around the city. They accumulate in the Gallery in printed form, amassing as a melancholy archive of loss. Post hoc reflects on our constant demand for growth and progress, highlighting the unrelenting new losses and extinctions occurring as our present moment becomes the past. For some, this data is all that remains.
Dane Mitchell’s practice is concerned with the physical properties of the intangible and visible manifestations of other dimensions. His work teases out the potential for objects and ideas to appear and disappear, and our ability to perceive or imagine transfiguration. His practice evokes a connection between the sensual and the conscious. It speculates on what is material and explores systems of knowledge or belief and people’s experiences of them.
Post hoc can really only be experienced in fragments; to hear the complete lists of millions of disappeared and invisible things would require listening an hour a day for more than three years. Over the course of the broadcast nothing is ever repeated — each utterance occurs once before sinking back into the past. The work attempts encyclopedic totality, yet like all databases, it is never complete, filled with voids, and arrested by its own development.
Post hoc will be set to original music produced for the series by the artist and a range of guest composers. The first year of the broadcast will include work by Al Doyle with Max Eastley; Hermione Johnson; Rosy Parlane; Rachel Shearer; Torben Tilly; Rob Thorne; Gillian Whitehead (guest composers supported by Chartwell Project).
Dane Mitchell’s Post hoc was first presented in 2019 as the Aotearoa New Zealand National Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (supported by Creative New Zealand).
TUNE INTO POST HOC EVERY DAY FROM JULY 31ST