Project Description

WHAT HAVE I TO DREAD is a sound and video installation that juxtaposes collected video recordings from before and after the Ferguson jury announcement with a traditional American hymn about pain, loss, and hope.

On the evening of November 24th, 2014, the city of Ferguson, MO and people across the world anxiously waited for the announcement of the grand jury decision on whether or not officer Darren Wilson, a white police officer who shot an unarmed black teenager Michael Brown on August 9th, 2014, was to be indicted. In Ferguson businesses boarded their windows, schools closed, and riot police prepared for violence while protests across the country mobilized.

As the news finally hit of Wilson’s failure to get indicted, I sat in my trailer on the UCSC campus, filled with frustration, anger, sadness, and confusion. While my friends and peers abandoned their protests against tuition hikes to join the protests in solidarity with Ferguson, and as I watched debates and information and disinformation blow up facebook, I felt so overwhelmed that I didn’t know how to react. For some reason joining in the protests just wasn’t where my heart was, and I didn’t know where to put my feelings.

Many thoughts ran through my head. Was the way police treated protesters ok? Was the way protesters reacted to police violence and treated the property in their community ok? What is our society’s true relationship with black people? How deep does our prejudice go? What was the right way to participate? What actions are the most effective and beneficial? And most importantly, where was my place in all this noise?

With all the noise and chaos, I couldn’t help but turn to my own philosophies. Where was God in this situation? As human beings, where do we all stand? Is it together or apart? How could anyone support the decision to kill an unarmed teenager? An idea came to my head, and I finally knew how I had to act.

The traditional Protestant hymn Leaning On The Everlasting Arms came into my head. The lines “what have I to dread/what have I to fear” stood out in my mind as I thought about how black lives are treated in the United States and across the world today, no matter how deep their faith goes. I thought about the lines “I have blessed peace/with my Lord so near” as I watched live feeds of riots and violence. This song is a song meant for comfort and solace, but I sang it with anger.

That night, I made a recording of myself singing the song with a simple acoustic guitar accompaniment over a hectic sound collage of newscasts, podcasts, etc I found online on Soundcloud under the #ferguson tag. This included podcasts from the recent days leading up to the indictment announcement and earlier ones made soon after the shooting. I collected hours of podcasts, going through them and selecting powerful, confusing, infuriating, hopeful, truthful, and informative soundbites from all perspectives. Even though my opinions on the verdict were biased, I wanted content from all sides– a snapshot of the image of America at this time, with different voices saying different things, sometimes contradicting each other–the noise of misinformation and information overload. I brought the recording into my electronic music workshop class at UCSC (MUSC 167/267), and my classmates, professors, and TA told me that the piece was extremely powerful and that I should expand upon the idea.

In January 2015, I began working with DANM student Andrea Steves (MFA ‘16) to create a sound installation version of the project. I then applied for and was awarded a Porter College Undergraduate Fellowship to complete the project. We assembled hours of video footage and podcast recordings of the Ferguson announcement and ensuing protests, news stories, and opinion pieces, I re-recorded the hymn, and we designed an installation version that used CRT monitors, speakers, and a loudspeaker. The installation was displayed at the DANM MFA Rejects show in the DARC lab on June 8th, 2015. In the installation, three television monitors were displayed in an arc playing different video loops of the Ferguson broadcasts, and four different podcast loops were played through four speakers interspersed amongst the tvs. The hymn was played at timed intervals through the loudspeaker, which was placed in the center of the installation atop the tvs, and created a crackly, ominous military-reminiscent ambiance.

America’s complicated past surfaces in small encounters that get amplified and distorted by mass media, filtered through a dizzying array of voices, and experienced in a way that may lead us to seek answers in what is familiar. WHAT HAVE I TO DREAD is an experience not meant to comfort or provide answers, but to raise questions, force listeners to come face-to-face with the raw emotion of a very human situation, and encourage action.