Jazmine (JT) Green
**We’re interviewing creators from Audio Flux’s first two circuits—you can listen to them now. They have opened up submissions for circuit three to the public! Click here to learn more.**
Before you read, quickly listen to Jazmine’s Fluxwork ‘Hard Reset’ here. It takes three minutes!
Interview by Devin Andrade of Podstack.
Jazmine (JT) Green is an audio documentarian by trade and artist by practice. She is the founder of Molten Heart, a duPont-Columbia award-winning creative and commercial studio focused on the texture of sound. Molten Heart’s collaborators include The Met, Stitcher Studios, and Audible. IG: @cmdjazmine; jtgreen.me
Her practice explores the spiritual qualities of improvisation, the convergence of technology and the human body, and the intersection of gender and race through visual, performance, and sound art. She writes and produces electronic music as CMD+JAZMINE. Her projects and performances have been exhibited at The University of Chicago and ICU VCA, received recognition such as the 2021 Third Coast Award for Best Documentary Short, and featured at festivals such as On Air and RESONATE.
What previous media/creations of your own or by others helped inspire you for this?
In 2021, I created this fiction short NFT(ease) which was commissioned by Jim Colgan and Benjamen Walker for this festival, Unfinished. The festival explored the future of arts and government through technology, and in this period, NFTs were all the rage. NFT(ease) imagined a future where there was a marketplace for Black culture to be traded on the blockchain, marketed as a way for artists, couched in activist language, to earn reparations for their hard work. A young man named Derrick, tired of hustling for gallery representation, comes across The Block, and begins creating viral dances in hopes of selling his creations. And sure enough, two years after my piece's debut, an NFT marketplace for Black creators was announced in the real world.
Before shifting my trade towards professional audio, I worked in the publishing and advertising world as a designer and web developer, mostly working with tech companies and large brands to convince people to buy products and services. This influenced a lot of media which informed this piece, including Mr. Robot, No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler, The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour, You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier, Mercury Retrograde by Emily Segal, Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble, Severance by Ling Ma, Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener, and Station Eleven.
What policy or practice in our current day feels like the biggest precursor to the ones that exist in your piece?
One, the continued miniaturization of technology (particularly with the fusing of self). Shortly before I was invited to this cohort, smartwatches for children were covered in a popular lifestyle report. The same week my Audio Flux piece debuted at On Air, Neuralink announced that the same technology I imagined was successfully used to control a handsfree interface in a test patient. Two, the increasing closed platform nature of an unregulated technology market. With increasing reliance on privately owned technology to do necessary tasks such as enter the subway or pay for food in cashless stores, platforms have the ability to control someone’s entire life experience which creates a lock-in that is as difficult to escape as changing your social security number. It’s likely that another pandemic or large force will disable our society yet again, and with government reliance becoming thinner with each hit (both politically and environmentally), it’s very likely that the only organizations with tendrils powerful enough to overtake them are global technology companies. And three, the growing wars on gender, sexuality, and freedom of choice. With our society in a space where everyone is interrogating the fraught system of our roles as humans based upon a doctor assigning a sex and (frankly) gender based upon organs, things can either go in the direction of an upheaval of this system, or a doubling down of medical categorization. Hard Reset, like all my favorite science fiction worlds, imagines the worst case scenario of these three outcomes, combining what feels to be a logical conclusion of these forces: technological miniaturization, governmental reliance on tech platforms, and medical-based categorization that has become so crucial to societal function, that a parent (or the government) is given the right to assign a tech platform at birth.
Having one of the companies named Rose and making their slogan say that “tinting your glasses isn’t so bad” was SO clever! How did you come up with the names and characters in your piece?
A popular thing technology companies do is both utilize branding and use materials that evoke organic environments and behaviors to soften what may be a scary thing to consumers. See: Lyft putting mustaches on the front of their cars, Apple watches designed like worry stones, ChatGPT saying “your welcome!” after a response. While this is a tool of creating comfort, all technology is born from organic materials to begin with, even if manufacturers want you to believe they were beamed from the gods of a designer’s brain. The essay “Sand in the Gears” in which Ingrid Burrington slowly grinds an iPhone down to its organic elements, acts as an exercise of remembering the material root (and consequence) of our technological future. Naming the two platforms Onyx and Rose, and creating their attributes on a rudimentary personality binary of “logic” and “creative”, and deploying cheeky branding for each, was a nod to these two ways of thinking.
Regarding the main characters, I based them on popular sci-fi archetypes (the freedom fighter, the doctor with a conscience, the tech leader with a good heart who accidentally becomes a power hungry mogul) while writing dialogue based upon the real life actors’ personalities.
What was the hardest part of making the idea in your head come to life through audio?
Frankly, because this piece was in the genre of near-future speculative fiction, translating it into audio was extremely simple. While much of technology is still based upon what you see, because of the continued miniaturization of products, companies saving money on screen technology by relying on audio, and the current advertising marketplace looking for new senses to monetize, these changing cultural attitudes of engaging with sound (people wearing wireless earbuds, voice assistants, audio ads, sonic branding, etc) made creating an audio only environment easier, because we are increasingly living in audio only environments in our real lives.
You were able to set up a world and introduce us to the rules so quickly. It made me want a part two or a whole series! How did you find the three minute time limit for establishing things and building an emotional reaction?
Because I used to work in advertising, I internalized the logic that building a world to engage emotion within the bounds of brevity is a feature, not a bug. Just like a pop song clocking out at 3 minutes, I wanted to make something that could be revisited and leave you craving more.
Choosing a fictional story for this piece opens up different creative and technical possibilities. What were you most excited about trying for this piece that was different from other audio projects you’ve made before?
The last two years I spent mostly producing non-fiction pieces, either autobiographical or deeply reported. I wanted to dive back into my imagination and build a world from the ground up. Also, I wanted to make a statement to myself as I believe that many marginalized creators are placed in a box where their only work of value is that that is deeply memoiristic and “shows what it's like in their lives” for the dominant culture to ingest and feel better about themselves after reading/listening/watching. I love seeing Black and queer creators create fantastical worlds that push the bounds of our reality, because we’re more than your source for inspirational content, we have a deep imagination too.
What was it like to create the dystopian world that your piece takes place in? How did you come up with the inspiration for it?
When I think of a new piece, I go on a walk with my voice memos turned on, and I just start talking aloud. I like to think of it as doing improv with my imagination. I usually start with an evocative prompt, like with this story, and work backward to think of all the steps and situations that would come about making that evocative prompt a reality. The story started with an idea: “what if there was a widely-adopted cochlear implant that also acts as a bodily and mind enhancement” and then worked backward to expand. In order for this implant to be widely accepted, society would have to see it as a net-good, which means it would have to be introduced as a solution to save the economy after a collapse which led many people to experience a trauma they never want to experience again. In order for this implant to be installed en masse, it would have to have a partnership with the medical system, be inexpensive and or free, and a technology company would have to have a non-technological incentive (platform lock in) in order to produce an expensive product with low profit margins. And what better way to do that in the most efficient and least expensive way than at birth when you’re already entered into the medical system and you have the potential for the earliest platform lock-in possible.
That, combined with my experience of living life as a transsexual woman, created the perfect storm for this world to exist.
I’m not gonna lie, your piece was a bit scary to listen to! It felt way too real or possible. What do you hope listeners take away from your piece or feel while they’re listening?
That you would either feel terrified about this potential reality or begin frantically searching for a private beta link to sign up for a Rose implant! I think both can simultaneously exist, because being aware of what makes a product, service, or even a political ideology sexy can help you deconstruct how tools of desire can be used to sway public opinion.
If you were to create another experimental three minute piece like this one, what lessons that you learned from this would you take with you to the next?
Three minutes of scene and dialogue goes a lot faster than you think. When I wrote the original script, it clocked out at roughly 15 minutes. John and Julie did an incredible job of finding the beats that were crucial to tell a three minute story, and use efficient wording and audible intonations that trimmed up necessary pages.
That, and making sure you feed your actors either hours before or immediately after you tape. While hilarious, I didn’t have “editing out burps and farts” on my post-production bingo card.
What do you hope Audio Flux does for other creatives in the industry right now?
What was excellent about Audio Flux was that the invite to create an idea based on a prompt was the key that unlocked an entire world that I would love to revisit and expand in the future. It evoked the spirit of Oblique Strategies—a portal into a subconscious universe that I may have not explored had I not heard the phrase “listening with.” It reminded me of my days of art school, where we spent an hour debating the meaning and properties of a circle on a chalkboard. Hopefully, with the days of the hyper-capitalist growth of the podcast boom times beyond us, we can have more moments of drawing a circle on the wall, and diving into it.
Thanks, Jazmine and Devin!