1998-2022
ten of my public space art projects
christian barré

“Since 1998, the work of Christian Barré is situated in the movement of the practices called “furtive” – a term borrowed from Patrice Loubier – and which, to be laconic, are the result of the maneuver and the intervention in public and private spaces. These practices, which today are also widely described as “infiltrating”, sometimes generate visible results in the institutionalized places of the art or inside of events that can assure their promotion and so promote and thus to make known their existence.” 

“Additionally, we can find them described and listed in the publications. Even though they are aesthetic representations, which approach the spectacular advertising representations, this is one of the ways thus by taking the proticulier’s knowledge: its reception does not let itself easily be defined. Most often, the material of a political gesture is the human being, who is also the privileged spectator” 

Sonia Pelletier DeepL translation from : “Des stratégies entre le rêve et la réalité”

Somewhere Over The Rainbow

Maison des arts de Laval (2020)

Marginalization is a delicate topic. the circumstances that lead to periods of exclusion are numerous. they are difficult to access and complex to portray. and sometimes they remain confusing for the people involved. these events remain painful to recall. for the participants, narrating the context of an unforeseen situation requires admirable moral strength. the concepts of “care” practice appear to be very important.

Cassini Montreal (2019)

To study an hypothetical strength on the relation between the amount of spatial phenomena in people’s living with mental health issues.This relation is analyzed for different age and socioeconomic groups. 

Cassandre Montreal (2019)

Cassandre is a project realized on and for the public space. (It is an occupation of reality using 3 layers. The "creation" is based on the appropriation of data. The "production" is a narrative reconstruction. The "presentation" is an intimate experience accessible on a geolocalize route. Each of these fractions of the work, is composed of an experience on the 3 creative axes of the literary, the sound and the image.

This work of listening relates to the creation of a “spatial” dialogism1. The detour towards the fiction of data (testimonies, opinions, exhibitions) extracted from social networks. It is used to attempt an enlightened representation of the anxious experience. It is a question of exhibiting and cataloguing the triggers of anxieties under several artistic forms. The intention is to reduce the emotional impact and educate the “viewer-gatherer” of information.

The title of the project, a ‘metaphor’ of AI

Cassandra receives from Apollo (Greek god of arts, song, music, beauty, poetry) the gift of telling the future but, as she refuses to accept him, he decrees that her predictions will never be believed, even by her family.

The myth of Cassandra shares familiarities with certain symptoms of the anxious individual. The latter involuntarily distances his entourage, tired of undergoing his fatalistic hallucinations! His bitter projections projected on a close future excuse a phantasmagoric substitution to the reality. His language impoverished by souffrance, gives way to a predisposition for credulity.

Our use of artificial intelligence
01. Cassandra (AI) first identifies similarities between anxiety triggers in the local population and media noise. We use mind mining for an informed analysis of the statues (posts) on social networks. The patterns are used for a scenario reconstruction. We want to measure the impact of an event on the dilution of a social and critical self. It serves to evaluate the internal conflicts between belief and perception. I explore the artificially maintained tension between middle class and learned culture.

02. Cassandra (IA) identifies the semantic concordances of distress discourse. Inspired by the masterpieces of literature, photography and cinema, she creates the combination useful to an elevation of the conception of discomfort. It suggests an eloquent permutation guaranteeing its embellishment. The aim is to expose the aesthetic value of existence. It serves to shred (literally) one’s soul. It encourages emotional detachment. It invites the rationalization of anxious experience from an alien poetic discourse.

Clapping symphony Space 21, Slemani, Kurdistan (2020)

This corpus is based on a video and audio recording of a series of 15 brief moves performed in public space. Their situations are brief. This is a measured observation of the social consequences of the current authoritarian degeneration.

The work “Clapping Symphony for 100 People” is a residency project in Kurdistan that began in Montreal. She is the culmination of a series of public-space initiatives that began in 2001. It lasts about 6 minutes and requires the cooperation of a large number of people. We are confident that a conductor (professional or amateur) will be present to direct the crowd’s applause. The participatory event is part of the festival’s programming put on by the festival’s host organisation, Space 21. Inspire by Ligeti’s Symphonie for 100 métronomes, my objective is to prepare its performance in three complementary corpus: repetition, accumulation, and distanciation. We can hear rythmic, tonal, and atonal correspondences when we listen to Ligeti’s work and a sound recording of audience applause at the same time. In addition to this observation, I’d like to highlight the paradoxical relationship between the capture of a “sound action” and its addition to the “surface” of a point of view (keeping in mind that this is an iconoclastic concept). I hope to develop coherent narrative arguments based on a series of ebauches produced in front of my house.

In the case of my “manoeuvre”, repetition ensures the readability of Ligeti’s original intention. This is an opportunity to legitimise his participation in my campaign. Its division into several disconcerting stories is unavoidable. This deconstruction is a planned work of recomposition and decomposition based on the alpha extraction of symphonic features for metronome, such as gesture repetition, sound accumulation (in the sense), gesture regression, time work, rhythmic work, and much more… My adaption seeks to deviate from its conception’s indexes. 

She is founded on two criteria: the obviousness of the unprovable and a cosmos free of any explanation. She takes the form of a certain point of view, a mark on the ground, and tools for understanding logistical planning. This unavoidable dialogue of resemblances simulates a stylistic representation of auditory experience that caricatures current scientific homologation. 

The proposal is intended to increase social awareness. She expresses her approvals in a stylistic manner within the context of a device justified by its historical depth. My rereading of Ligeti’s work provides the necessary pretext for imagining equivalences in sound and vision that make use of metaphor, irony, or satire. This corpus is primarily based on dispersion (inspired by the Kurdish diaspora). 

The goal is to imagine conceptual connections from a philosophical vocabulary (particularly Deleuze’s deterritorialization) to artistic expression. It is possible to rethink a subject outside of the constraints imposed by conventional Western artistic traditions through the use of an image of a “sound object.”

Imbroglios 2

Scena Otwarta, Poznań, Pologne (2020)

A coffe cup with a blur picture of a homeless

Art in the Eastside, Belfast Festival, Irlande du Nord (2014)

By appropriating the codes of a consciously commercial aesthetic, the artist simulates the experience of a car crash based on the critical scope of satire. As he explores and multiplies these stagings of an emotion associated with tragedy, 

Christian Barré portrays the modern individual as an object entangled in the phantasmagorical world of merchandise.

Applause – (42 minutes)
Deep focus for swallow self, Art souterrain,(2010)

42 guests of the #OldMissionBrewery received the artist’s full fee after a minute of applause on camera. #videoperformances #christianbarre  42 was exhibited in the main corridor of the World Trade Centre in Montreal during #ArtSouterrain 2011. 

42 guests of the Old Mission Brewery applauded for a minute in front of the camera and were paid the entire  artist’s fee. 

 

Car Crash Memories

Galerie SAS, Montréal (2009)

Starting from a precise recovery of parts of damaged luxury cars, I want to create a body of video and photographic work that presents these objects in the manner of a catalog. 

Using the techniques of chiaroscuro lighting, regularly used for the marketing of “luxury” objects, I intend to deprive the damaged object of its dramatic overload in order to associate it with a feeling of mercantile “déjà vu. 

My intention is to create images that faithfully reproduce the aura of “good taste” that is exceptionally associated with major commercial brands. The ironic perversion of this body of work lies in its false anthropological intent, juxtaposed with a real advertising-like facture. Voluntarily guilty of forgery, I explore by a doubtful association, the abject of the random event that is the accident to lead to a deeply connoted sensualist alternative.

Christian Barré’s photographic series Car Crash Memories is intended to expose and challenge the alienation that advertising imagery fosters. 

Catalog of subjective marks and its ironic consequences

 

"Somewhere between Chantal Maes' perception of reality and Gabor Szilasi's studio staging is Christian Barré's latest project, which also gives his models a free choice. These photos and videos are meant to be a critique of the dreams that advertising and consumer society holds out to us - "empty promises", says the artist. No wonder his rendering is a hyper-glossy one, beautiful and perfect images taken either inside a (real) wrecked car or in a studio. His stagings are rooted in the aesthetics of cinema (Cronenberg's Crash, for example) and in the history of art. Invited to imagine themselves suffocated by the release of an airbag, his models assume classical poses drawn from religious representations. Advertising promises are perhaps not so far from spiritual enchantment."

De la révolution

La Bande Vidéo, résidence de production, Québec (2007)

“The challenge to the myth and the genre instituted by the Americans is the opportunity for Sergio Leone to make four successive westerns Political reflection becomes as serious as academic and denigrates the spectacular and baroque form. In Once Upon a Revolution (1971), Leone lets his bitterness and disappointment about the revolution show through. It is the emblematic scene of argument about political lucidity: Coburn is mistaken, the revolution will always be recovered by the powerful.”
Jean-Baptiste Thoret, supplément au DVD Wild side , 2009.

Like A Complete Unknown

La Bande Vidéo, Québec (2007)

I Will Not Apologize

Galerie oeuvre de lʼAutre, UQÀC (2007)

Les baisers de résistance

Maison de la culture Frontenac, Montréal (2007)

Jealous Guy,

Événement international art et santé mentale, Folie/Culture, Québec (2006)

The maneuver unfolds in the social fabric, it leans on it to realize its project. It presents itself as an attempt to work with an unusual material, which is the citizen himself. The maneuver will be concretized by an adequacy of sensibility between artists and citizens. In this sense, here is an art that risks not to exist and especially not to be seen in a usual way. Already, by their dispersion in the city, these rueral interventions rely on an intrusive occupation of the human landscape. We have invited the artists to work downtown. In this rather vast geographical confinement, you will have the chance to cross paths with one or another of the projects in progress.

Christian Barré proposes stagings where fake and real couples find themselves drawn into tumultuous crises of female possessiveness. The street becomes the scene of a cruel merry-go-round where you could be dragged along.

Thanks to Véronique Garneau Allard

"The very articulation of this work presupposes voluntary participants at both ends of the action. It is indeed a question posed in the space8. But the answer to which remains in suspense between the participants. There is an improbable contact between two groups, two clans by means of two codes: the applause and the demonization of the applause.fin de partie ot1 each one remains on his positions, but where the principle of intrusion recommends a virus.  In spite of the statements of the artist who pretends not to want to make a political action, this maneuver is a true criticism where two modalities of existence are compared. "
Alain-Martin Richard
Extract from the DSM catalog of Folie-Culture

Femme réfugiée, immigrante reçue

État d’urgence, ATSA, Montréal (2006)

For ATSA, he proposes a photographic intervention on the subject subject of immigration among women with refugee status.

A high percentage of women are admitted to Canada under questionable criteria and without necessarily being properly documented. and without necessarily being properly informed about their place in society.

This photographic work provides information on the place that women have in our western economy.

dignité/dignity

Territoires urbains, MAC de Montréal (2005)

Christian Barré is especially known for his interventions in public space. His work, which most often uses strategies related to systems of mass communications, makes the city his framework for observation and analysis. More specifically, he uses and twists the use of communicational models in order to intervene in social and political realms. With an emphasis on the social function of art, Barré seeks to infiltrate unknown worlds that involve intimacy, proximity and people’s private lives. His goal is, to a certain extent, to effect the insertion of ordinary people and society’s rejects into the social fabric. — Réal Lussier

"Most effective was Christian Barré's project called "Dignity." Here, a number of women strike poses in slick fashion- or advertising-photography mode. But his subjects are not super models. They are women who have once been, or still are, homeless, or prostitutes, or drug addicts. Their accompanying stories prove poignant and resonate long after the visit."

MARIE Trudel

Sunday 10:25 am
September 4, 2005

“Hello Christian,I feel a certain genius and a little ashamed to speak to you about my story, I do so at your request. How did it happen, this end of the road, me and my spouse, had, I think, a flat life, I was not working, it is the end of the year 2004, no social life, at all. I was doing things at home, a little bit of DIY, domestic things etc. …. My husband was working for a company that wasn’t always correct with him, he was working all the time. We didn’t see each other much. My mother died in January 2003, and two months later, at the end of March, we had to leave the house. We moved the stock into a warehouse and we got a hotel, a motel. It was quite expensive. One good day, I said to myself: I am going to go away to the O.B.M., place of lodging for woman, he lived, at a friend’s place. At first, staying there was not empty, I felt like I was in a kind of prison. But you quickly get used to it. I used to watch a lot of good movies, you have a roof over your head, especially in the winter (end of August 2004, I’m the O.B.M.), you have your bed (223 in a corner), clean sheets, once a week. There you have rules to follow, it’s okay, like this, otherwise it would be free for all in there, forget it. I liked this life, even the O.B.M., it’s not just a recreational one, I knew people.”

Marie – (has Jean Shrimpton)
épreuve couleur | color print
39,5” X 31,5” | 100,3 cm X 80cm,
(encadrés) All rights reserved – Tous doits réservés Christian Barré 2006

Image original de la prise de vue de Jean Shrimpton with kerchief,
photo John French. London, UK, 1960s

Jessie Dumont

A pose taken by Jessie or Marie does not have the arrogance of a professional model. This game of exhibition, which reveals in its postures a counterpart of the model’s personality, remains the display of familiar stereotypes. Although they add a certain playfulness to the work, these “sentimental” clichés induce an inspiration of origin
advertising.

The presence of “dignity” in a museum institution, “injects human randomness” with a strategy directly borrowed from advertising semantics. It is by a gesture of artist that takes shape a personified component of the feminine itinerancy: an attitude that pretends to a “tangibility” of the subject inspired by the experience of organized meeting.

Jessie – (has)
épreuve couleur | color print
39,5” X 31,5” | 100,3 cm X 80cm,
(encadrés) All rights reserved – Tous doits réservés Christian Barré 2006

Image original de la prise de vue de Jean Shrimpton with kerchief,
photo John French. London, UK, 1960s

Jessie Dumont

I met Jesse Dumont in May 2005.

This 53-year-old woman told me she had six children (including a nine-year-old girl) and that she was writing a book: “Le bas fond de la rue et l’enfer de l’itinérance” (“Down and Out in the Street and the Misery of Homelessness”). I never saw the book. Jesse was punctual and worked on her sittings, she put an effort into preparing for them, she even cut out pictures from magazines. She let herself go, despite her back pain, which prevented her from holding a pose longer than thirty seconds. Jesse had been a stripper for 32 years. She lived in Viger park for an entire summer. She washed in a fountain and slept behind some bushes. When it rained, she waited under a children’s slide. Jesse didn’t show up for her last session. There are many rumours about her death.

Monument à la prostituée inconnue

Cynismes, Manif dʼart 3, Biennale de Québec (2005)

Let us recall Mediation (1999), one of the few installations that addressed the topic of the marginalised and whose marginals, and which also belonged to an operation aiming to deflect the conventions conventions. Mediation (1999), along with Monument to the Unknown Prostitute (2005), was one of the few installations by the artist that was more immediately available to the public.

 
Monument à la prostituée inconnue

Audrey 

(2005)

 

 

Bitter Anthems

SPACE Art Gallery, Pittsburgh, (2005)

Video installation

The invention of official music dates from the beginning of the XVIII  century. Works of this kind are baptized “political music” and testify to the aspiration for a tangible collective identity. The usage of choruses denotes the formation of a national collective and is stated by itself. 

I offer six videos based on the anthems “O Canada!” (in French and English), Marseilles (France), God Save the Queen (United Kingdom), Mameli/Novaro (Italy) and the “Deutschland Lied” (Germany). 

The metaphor of “The American Anthem” is positioned between the solitary right of speech and the universal policy to evoke political responses.

 

The performer sings “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Italian to the melody of the French national anthem of Rouget de Lisle.
Annie Leroux -Singer – France
The performer sings “The Star-Spangled Banner ” in German to the melody of the German national anthem of Haydn.
Karsten Muller – Actor – Germany
The performer sings “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Italian to the melody of the Italian national anthem of Novaro.
John Mingolla -Guide – Italia

Equivalence, Stephane Boudreau 

(One and Three , Tribute to Joseph Kosuth)

Contemporary Art and Public Space, Biennale de Montréal (2004)

In the project Equivalence, the effectiveness of this process is reproduced with a mobile device: in a demonstration of excess, an employee-driver of a company of advertising trucks will find himself represented on the billboard of his own truck.

 

Réfléchir par hasard,
Pour un espace public agile

 

ALICA – Alliance pour la circulation de l’art 8 manoeuvres en quête d’un territoire, 9 septembre au 4 novembre (2001)

 
"Barré's project borrows these strategies, that is to say, it lets what is part of the couple's dynamic explode in public. In the bus, at the exit of a restaurant, in short in places of obliged conviviality, where each one is uneasy in front of the spreading of the personal problems. This action thus questions two "pathological" (?) behaviors: the possessiveness which is expressed by jealousy and the tacit relations between exhibitionists and voyeurs. Contrary to the invisible theater, the exposure of the private in shared social spaces, does not come to raise a debate on a social problem, it just comes to confirm the end of the private. Discretion, restraint, delicacy, respect of the bubble of the other are so many obsolete notions to put in the museum of a theater of the isolation. From now on, we all live together, to counter the withdrawal into indifference, to abolish the common solitude. This obvious extimacy erases the blurred line between life and work. There is here a public artistic manifestation, since it is an invention, an emotional fiction, but never claimed as such. Is the intrusion in the public sphere here the expression of the artist or the simple claim of the artist to feel a current feeling and to manifest it publicly as such? But without ever saying that it is a subterfuge? The question remains in suspense between art and life."
Alain-Martin Richard
ALICA - Alliance pour la circulation de l'art 8 manoeuvres en quête d'un territoire

Réfléchir par hasard, Pour un espace public agile

ALICA – Alliance pour la circulation de l’art 8 manoeuvres en quête d’un territoire, 9 septembre au 4 novembre (2001)

In his project Réfléchir par hasard – Pour un espace public agile, Barré relies on two social elements to build his maneuver. The basic material is developed from the active presence of Montreal’s tramps and homeless. Invited to come out of their anonymity by a very simple action – clapping while looking at the lens of a video camera – the itinerants ask themselves why they are doing this. The question remains open, but most are intensely engaged. Their environment is concrete, it is located on the edge of a park, it may contain an old armchair, and they are sitting or standing in front of an empty wall or set with graffiti… 
The artist considers this piece to be his most beautiful work; artistic because it joins the Sartrean thought of Doing, being-for-itself philosophy. He will admit to having done a lot during this maneuver. The video is engraved on a compact optical disc, which is then attached to Mercedes, whose properties constitute the other part of this maneuver. 
There is here an unexpected and unexpected link between two micro-communities that nevertheless circulate in the same labyrinth. How does each one interpret the urban codes that he or she experiences daily? What does the presence of one mean in the visual space of the other? 
Réfléchir par hasard, Pour un espace public agile

Enjoy!

Interférences, Mois de la photo de Montréal, Station de métro Berri-UQAM (2001)

From September 1 to 30, 2001 Artists have been invited to create a specific project in the poster network of the Berri-UQAM metro station. 
By presenting very ambiguous images in this advertising-laden space, the artists create an interference that incites the city dweller to question what he sees – or no longer sees – every day when he takes the trolley. 
Disturbing, satirical and sometimes even ironic, their images attract his attention and inevitably change the reading habits to which he is accustomed by advertising imagery. 
They also question his modes of being in the public eye, which gradually lead him to shut himself up in a sort of bubble in order to escape from promiscuity while taking advantage of visual overconsumption.

MÉTRO Berri-UQAM artists INTERF RENCES A public intervention produced by Curator: Marie-Josée Jean

En soi / In itself

3e Impérial, Granby (1999)

It started with the artist entering the life of 47-year-old Mrs. Boily, and after several meetings, they decided together what would remain as fragments of her life to appear in text on the back of her own image. 
On Cowie Street in Granby, the portrait of the woman was embedded like an advertising sign in a light box. By presenting the dreamy and unreal in this way, an image from the ordinary world and private space not only appears grand but also produces a surprising effect.
 

Mute

Montréal Télégraphe, Montréal (1998 )

The work of the “Mute” project proceeds by a commodification of various structural paradigms. In the use of language in everyday life, it is often the function that gives the object its name; a ” work of art “, on the other hand, remains an object titled and manipulated by the ideology in place.
However, by the association of a utilitarian function attached to the art object is elaborated a place of exchange where the named and the titled are placed in opposite. 
As much this object now practical gains in sense in a daily newspaper, as much it describes the situation in which it persists and brings us to reconsider its place in the spheres of the art. 
It is thus following a practical experience of the object that one can speculate that there is “art”, that there is meaning.
 
"The performers at the opening demonstrated with apparent skill the usefulness of the object. In reality, these performances were performed by "real actors", who were invited and paid to do what they usually do on the sidewalks and at intersections. Is it bad taste to disguise human misery in this way as a show for art lovers or is it a political act to present a reality we can no longer see? "
"The performers at the opening demonstrated with apparent skill the usefulness of the object. In reality, these performances were performed by "real actors", who were invited and paid to do what they usually do on the sidewalks and at intersections. Is it bad taste to disguise human misery in this way as a show for art lovers or is it a political act to present a reality we can no longer see? "

At least, these programmed actions are about irony, about the derision to pursue to the absurd the functional logic of the objects. Previously, it was especially a question of withdrawing the value the use of an object to give him an artistic sense: now, it is Christian Barré who manufactures, starting from a certain conception of the art, objects being able to circulate in the sphere of the everyday life. Difficult to give them at this time an aesthetic autonomy, they are necessarily
dependent on a handling or tributary of a function. The absurdity of the thing comes especially from their rather unusual field of application, since these objects do not answer
The absurdity of the matter stems above all from their rather unusual scope of application, since these objects do not meet any demand and do not fulfill any marketing criteria in order to be really marketed. Itinerants or squeegees are not strictly speaking a target audience, wealthy enough to consume novel objects cleverly designed to embellish their daily life. It is not a question of inventing flexible drinking straws, cups with two handles or a soup bowl with a spout to compensate for the lack of dexterity of an elderly person.

Even if the objects created by Christian Barré have a use value, they testify above all to the exchange value that regulates most relationships between humans. Like paper money, his objects serve as intermediaries in a relationship based on trade or the exchange of symbolic goods.
symbolic goods. The beggar’s piggy bank stages a financial transaction that responds to the criteria of supply and demand, defined however by moral values: guilt, human dignity, altruism, etc. The piggy bank has also become the symbolic object to inculcate
The piggy bank has also become the symbolic object to inculcate in children the meaning of money and the accumulation of capital, a principle that does not respond to the emergencies and the immediate survival of a homeless person. The squeegee with an advertising insert continues this strategy of detour by taking up the principle of advertising which supposes that all public space can be covered with an advertising image. There have been public toilets, Internet sites, the truck whose only function is to circulate through the city with an advertising panel, so why not the handle of a squeegee? As a highly visible, if not cumbersome, element, the squeegee offers a perfect target to advertise a product to all motorists. In addition, the
squeegee could make extra money. Another device also allows to write, with the help of an ink pad, “thank you for legitimizing me”, thus regulating, in a somewhat perverse way, the solemn and so customary symbolism of a handshake. The object then becomes the concrete mark of a
The object becomes then the concrete mark of a financial, commercial and power relation, like this club with two handles which cancels the opposite relations of force (object of mediation I).

The perversity of the intervention is to put in contradiction as much the ideals of the art as the marketing of the ideals. In this sense, Christian Barré’s approach seeks to invalidate the usual process of image production. Even if he takes up the tools of the advertising display, he does not show anything that could solicit the desire of the eye. In his panel for the sandwich man, the image simply shows a closed eye, surmounted by an abscess obviously suggesting the disease of the gaze to always want to see more, even if there is nothing to show. Its advertising device amply demonstrates its ostentatious capacities, although nothing is revealed, except the image of a resignation, of an abandonment which does not correspond to the profitability of the emotions, subtly exploited in the true advertising images.
Since the beginning of the sixties, the performance as a creative gesture has taken a lot of importance. The stake was often to create a duplication between reality and fiction. Presented in real time, several performances played on the authenticity and spontaneity of the gesture, even if everything was organized in advance. Curiously, each performance requires a support, objects that testify to the act. Photographs, videos, objects give an account of what happened during an event. It is possible to follow, since these last thirty years, a constant transformation of the relations between the performative gesture and the iconographic support which accompanies it.

Transformed into objects bearing witness to an action, the latter become more or less substitutes or relics of an event that has already taken place and that is not likely to be repeated. Conversely, the Christian Barré’s objects are not designed for a single event; they can possibly be reintroduced in other circumstances without the artist being present.

Through this tradition of performance, it is possible to see once again a simple gesture of provocation. Except that there is no longer anything to transgress and Christian Barré organizes instead, at this point, a game where the exterior and interior space and the difference between simulation and reality are confronted. In fact, it is an intervention that is humanistic enough to believe in change and too cynical to assume that the interests in place want to change their position.

Hence the principle of inversion or annihilation in his latest installation at Plein Sud. Mediation thus offers a platform with a microphone that records nothing. Instead, it discloses the rights of the person to whoever wants to hear them. 

The microphone is no longer a simple sound sensor, it has become sensitive to its entire environment.