Artist, Carolyn Lazard: Hi, I’m Carolyn Lazard, and I’m an artist.
A Conspiracy is a series of white noise machines, installed upside-down on the ceiling in a grid formation. I first encountered them when I would go to therapy. I started to understand these little containers as being able to produce privacy. And so I wanted to think about how sound could be used sculpturally.
When I was making this work, I learned that if you had a critical mass of white noise machines turned on, that you could stand in one corner of a room and have a conversation and somebody standing on the other side of the room wouldn’t be able to hear you. That opened up a new possibility for how we might inhabit institutions.
The work is titled A Conspiracy, and conspiratorial speech is often oriented towards revolution and oriented towards major societal, political shifts. But it starts between two people and it grows and it expands. Something I've also thought a lot about is gossip as a form of community care that allows people to share information that keeps communities safe.
So this work is sort of an attempt to imagine ways to meet each other inside of what might be the oppressive structures of institutions or what might be the impossibilities of certain kinds of speech inside of institutions.