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ANNA LOG   /   DOSSIER   /   SIGNAL

ANNA LOG · PUBLIC MEDIA

SIGNAL

INTERVIEWS · FEEDS · GIGS · PUBLIC NOISE

"Because we can doesn't mean we have the right to."

• INTERVIEWS
• 001 · THE SOUND WITCH
• 002 · OPEN CHANNEL
• 003 · OPEN CHANNEL

INTERVIEW ARCHIVE

Recorded conversations, public appearances, virt sessions, and long-form Signal traffic.

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SIGNAL ARCHIVE · INTERVIEW 001

THE SOUND WITCH

An interview with Anna Log

At twelve thousand people, a crowd becomes something else. Anna Log calls it a transaction. Her critics might call it manipulation. Her fans call it magic.

ANNA LOG: You know everyone always asks me right off the rip how much of what I do is AI generated? What kind of question is that? Without AI, could I generate this? Maybe. With twenty years and half a billion eddies. The fuck.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. That's the lazy version of the question. Like asking a guitarist how much of the song was generated by the amplifier. So let me ask it differently. When twelve thousand people walk into one of your spaces and twelve thousand different versions of the same performance start happening, what part of that is unmistakably Anna Log?

ANNA: Hey, give me one sec? Need to give you more bandwidth. Honestly, I was gonna blow this off. I mean, but it's you. Just truth in lending, my guy, you reach more stacks in twenty days than me in twenty decades. That is no bullshit. You know, same question back at ya, because most people assume you're AI. So how much of you is real? But dig, let me sync on my console and I'll rejoin virt. I got the link. Heh. I'm typing this through my onboard. Tedious. Wait one. Inbound.

TRUTH IN LENDING · VIRT FEED

When Anna Log rejoins, something has changed. Not merely the fidelity. The space itself feels larger.

ANNA: Aight. This is much better. Oh shit, I feel like I can breathe in here. So yeah, that wasn't a strategic pause to look up a proper answer. Just felt confined where we started. Though I have to say I'm happy we did start there. I would have lost my line of reasoning. To answer your question, yes, the experience is different for the twelve thousand. But the magic of it is that it is not different for the twelve thousand. That is why someone called me a Sound Witch and the name stuck. I cast a spell. You have to understand the tech, so ask me about that later, but the sounds... Okay. The mixing is unmistakably me. I take the current hits, the ones that make you feel something, the influencers, the social media feeds, the dooooom-scroll memetic dance that gets your ass moving and your monkey screaming. I mix that in and play it back to the twelve thousand. That is the part of me working for them live at The Tank, or DT, or Clubs and Spades. I'm doing the DJ work. Spinning. Sampling. Moving my fingers live on the wax and trying to bring the old-school underground scene from basement bars, garage clubs, the old West Coast hip-hop scene or those dank East Coast clubs.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. That's the distinction. You aren't generating twelve thousand personalized shows. You're creating one show that twelve thousand people can enter from twelve thousand different positions. The personalization isn't the spell. It's how the spell gets delivered. And underneath all that machinery, you're still doing the oldest fucking job in the room. Reading the crowd. Finding the thing they're already carrying around inside them, cutting it against something they recognize, then putting your hands on the wax and deciding exactly when to let it loose. Sound Witch. All right. You told me to ask about the tech later. It's later. Walk me through what happens to me when I show up at The Tank. I come through the door with my optics, Agent, socials, whatever implants I'm carrying. What does Anna Log's system ask me to give it? And what do I get in return?

Anna smooths out her droid-locks. Hair and optical fabric flow uneasily across a series of medplast trodes and implants littering the left side of her occipital lobe. The right side carries far fewer implants, although the important ones are mirrored there. The left carries the interface hardware. It is heavier. More pronounced. Old-school technology. At least thirty years old. Probably closer to forty. Well maintained. And very well hacked.

ANNA: So it's all opt-in, of course. You can come to a show and just watch the show. Depending on what tech you have. I've had virgins and monks come to the show, and they are fun to watch. They see, but they do not feel. Like watching porn, not being a porn star. If you opt in? It's easy, really. All around the place you'll see my queer code. Scan it on your vis and it'll take you to the opt-in page. If your Agent is set up to accept, it's a choice when you pay the ticket and venue fee, and you'll be dropped right into the sub-stack. Lots of shit in there. Social links if you're uploading. Audio and visual feeds if you sport the right gear. Near-field. Agent-to-Agent links. Old-school BT and 802.11CE. Those feeds, if your Agent can process them, carry some more subtle information and Zigg-minus capability. But the most important aspect of the PAN is that if you opt into the near-field, you act as a receiver and a retrans. Which extends the cloud, or fog, out as far as people are gathered close enough to each other. If you go to a show, you'll notice people crowd in close. Lots of touching. Lots of bodies. That is me really breathing. "Come closer." Fuckin' gets me off. You're smart, though. You can put that together with the tech, yeah? See how it propagates? See how when you open up like that, you're like an antenna? Receiving the signal. A good show? Fuck, my guy. Feels like I've been fucking for hours. Like I say. Porn star versus masturbate.

Anna barks a laugh. Though we're sitting together only in virt, I watch her hand instinctively reach for a cigarette. She lights one. The way people do after sex. Or apparently after one of her shows.

ANNA: I didn't answer the question, did I?

INTERVIEWER: No. But I think you answered a better one. I can put the architecture together. You're building a human mesh. Venue infrastructure seeds it, but the audience becomes part of the transport layer. Every opted-in PAN is receiver, participant and potentially another hop. Density isn't just crowd energy anymore. Density improves the fucking network. And that explains something I've noticed in footage from your shows. People don't spread out even when there's room. They compress toward each other. So now I want the piece you skipped. You've described the transport. You've described what you can send over it. But somewhere between those two things is Anna Log. You're standing behind the decks with twelve thousand antennas breathing around you. What information is coming back? What lets you know that what you just dropped worked?

ANNA: Transactions, my guy.

Since we're already in virt, Anna opens her feed in window mode. The room disappears. Suddenly we're sitting inside a sphere.

ANNA: You remember the Sphere? I think it got torn down in '43, but it was like CBGB for this shit. You familiar with "incunable"? The incubator of books? Gutenberg? The spread of something new and the way data gets transmitted has always been in this evolution. Some see it as, like, "the signs of the fall," and get all panicky and shit. Okay. That isn't where I'm going with this answer. It's where it begins. Transaction. The exchange of information. When people come to the show, they don't just open up to the music. They open up to me. Especially if they're already on my SM feeds. They're already in the community. They're already a known entity. You walk into a show and my Agent is already working on your feed, feeding your ALGOR into the CLDR-0N. The Cauldron. It's a hardware and app-layer Agent extension that sees what you look at and makes a distillate for me. When I'm spinning, I'm also searching the feeds. Not random. It's like plucking strings on a harp, really. Though there are a billion strings. Everything everyone in the room shared. What they dwell on. Where they go. What they buy. Who they fuck. What their wake-up alarm is. Everything they open up gets fed into the soup. And I swim through it in BD. It is the only way to do it. There is no other way that I've seen. And it's where the real magic is. It's also the part that makes me lament my Agent. She... She can't feel it. But without her, I wouldn't be able to pull it all together. Or, well... You know, people shit on AI. "It's not human." She sees more of the humanity than half the room. The feed distills. I pluck. We see where the vibration spirals out. I pluck. We keep going. A new feed shared by three hundred. Pluck. A new dream shared by twenty. A new influencer shared by five hundred. And the next thing I know I'm plucking the string that makes three thousand vibrate. My guy? If you can get three thousand souls to vibrate, you can get twelve thousand on the next pluck. That is when you know it worked. When the room is staring at the ceiling with you, mouth open, panting, watching the feed as it loops through my BD and gets pumped into the PAN. They don't need BD to feel together. It's fucking insanity and sex and violence and beauty and art. And I'm fucking addicted.

For several seconds I say nothing. The ghost of the old Sphere continues moving around us.

INTERVIEWER: Fuck. Okay. I was wrong before. I called the audience the transport layer. That's only half of it. They're the instrument. The Cauldron isn't deciding what twelve thousand people should experience. It's reducing something no human nervous system could possibly perceive at that scale into something you can play. Your Agent finds resonances. You touch one. Then you watch the transaction propagate through the room. If it catches, you touch the next one. And yeah, I know incunabula. I think I finally understand why you brought it up. The Sphere was Gutenberg. Spectacular information transmission, but fundamentally still one source broadcasting outward. What you're describing isn't broadcast. It's recursive. The audience gives you the material. Cauldron distills it. You recognize something in the distillate and put your hands on it. The audience receives what you've made, reacts, and that reaction becomes new material. Then you play that. So I've got two questions now. And one of them scares the shit out of me. First: How fast does that loop get? And second... Have you ever plucked a string and realized afterward that you probably shouldn't have?

Anna picks at a scab on her arm and shakes her head.

ANNA: Yes and no. For the second part. That's a hard fucking question, my guy, and I'll think about answering it better than that. But yes and no.

Something changes. The feed takes on a dampened quality, as though Anna has cut something from her own reverb in the virt meeting. Except there was no reverb. There was nothing there to begin with. Just a datalink. So why did the room suddenly stop feeling like something?

ANNA: The answer to your second question is very much tied to your first, so... Inference. Transmission. Giving you the material... Though I might not want to say it. The loop can spin soft and easy. Hard and fast. I bring up sex a lot, not because I'm a nympho or something. Though I think maybe I am. Or an addict. Or simply need the dopamine and endorphin and oxytocin... How fast can the loop get? People don't read the small print, my guy. I'll post, like, if I'm spinning for Maelstrom, I'll put on the gig feed: "A little bit of the ultra-violence." Because that is the feed they thrive on. I get a free pass in a way. I come into the Totentanz... It's not my shit, you know? I'm not like that inside. But they look at me like...

She lets the sentence die.

ANNA: Or water out in the Badlands. I play Tank and water out there a lot, and those gigs are more moving, going, speeding, getting away, arriving, loving, leaving, getting away with more. It spins to the group. I pluck the strings. But they provide me the strings. I can only pluck what is there. That is kinda your answer to the second. I don't pluck strings that aren't there. I don't foist a Totentanz bloodbath on the Tank. If I pluck that string... I betray the people. I betray the people, and I've... All this, the thing I've done? It's a sin. It's a good question. But if I ever have, or if I ever will again, is not something... Not somewhere I'm going to take you. You don't want to be there.

I watch the change in the feed. Whatever disappeared, I noticed it. I don't chase it.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. I think that's the first boundary you've given me that isn't technical. You can only pluck a string that's already there. But that's not the same as saying you aren't responsible for how hard you pluck it. And I think I understand the warning on the gig feed now. "A little bit of the ultra-violence" isn't advertising. It's disclosure. You're telling people something about which part of themselves this room is likely to feed back at them. I'm not going where you just told me not to go. But I do want to stay right at the edge of it. You called crossing that line a sin. Not a mistake. Not a bad set. Not abusing the technology. A sin. What do you believe you owe the people who open themselves to you?

Anna studies me.

ANNA: You're smart, my guy, so I'll lead you there. But you're going to fill in the data, okay? Like a history lesson. Like a reality bath. Because we can doesn't mean we have the right to. Let me have that be my inline quote. Tell me about Lippmann and Bernays. Tell me about propaganda and Public Opinion.

INTERVIEWER: All right. Reality bath. Walter Lippmann published Public Opinion in 1922. His problem was scale. Modern society had become too complicated for any individual to experience directly, so people necessarily acted on simplified mental representations of reality. He called them "the pictures in our heads." Whoever influences those pictures has enormous influence over what people believe reality to be. Then Edward Bernays comes along. Freud's nephew, significantly. In Propaganda in 1928, Bernays becomes much more comfortable with the practical implication. Mass society can be deliberately organized by shaping desires, associations, symbols and social behavior. What would eventually become known as the engineering of consent. And propaganda isn't necessarily lying. That's the important part. The more sophisticated version selects, associates, amplifies and repeats things that are already psychologically available. You don't necessarily manufacture the string. You find it. And you pluck it.

Anna has gone very still.

INTERVIEWER: Which makes your line considerably heavier than it sounded thirty seconds ago. "Because we can doesn't mean we have the right to." You've independently built something Bernays would have fucking killed for. Except his feedback loop operated through newspapers, radio, advertising, polling and sales. Yours can recognize the pictures in twelve thousand heads, distill their common resonances, and return them to those same people before the feeling that produced them has even finished happening. So, Sound Witch... Where did you learn enough history to become afraid of your own instrument?

Anna Log fixed her stare on me, and that missing something that was in the zeros and ones then gone? It was back in the watery stare. I couldn't tell if she was going to cry or if she might rip my throat out. Either way I was glad we were in the Virt. She wasn't being theatrical though I'm not saying it wasn't beautiful but I saw something in her face simply break.

ANNA: You said you weren't going to ask.

The feed terminates.

For a moment I remain sitting there, looking at the empty space where Anna Log had been. I don't reconnect. I don't message her. I don't turn to my audience with an explanation. There isn't one that makes what just happened better. Finally, I say the only thing left to say.

INTERVIEWER: Fuck. She was right. I said I wouldn't go there. And I did.

FROM THE INTERVIEW

"The feed distills. I pluck. We see where the vibration spirals out. I pluck. We keep going."

"If you can get three thousand souls to vibrate, you can get twelve thousand on the next pluck."

"Because we can doesn't mean we have the right to."

SIGNAL ARCHIVE · INTERVIEW 002

OPEN CHANNEL

Reserved for the next interview.

SIGNAL ARCHIVE · INTERVIEW 003

OPEN CHANNEL

Reserved for a future Signal interview.

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FEED=

PUBLIC FEED

Posts, fragments, warnings, broadcasts, and whatever Anna lets escape into public space.

@ANNALOG · PUBLIC

Better sound shifts reality.

ARCHIVED SIGNAL

@ANNALOG · GIG FEED

A little bit of the ultra-violence.

TOTENTANZ SIGNAL

FUTURE FEED ITEMS

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GIGS=

GIG SIGNALS

Venue-specific feeds, warnings, emotional weather, and the signal surrounding an Anna Log performance.

THE TANK

BADLANDS · HOME SIGNAL

Water. Motion. Leaving. Returning. Open sky and bodies packed close enough to carry the fog.

TOTENTANZ

MAELSTROM · NIGHT CITY

Hard loops, violent imagery, industrial rhythm, and a crowd that knows exactly what it opted into.

NEXT GIG SIGNAL

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PRESS=

PRESS / MENTIONS

Reviews, reposts, reactions, club footage, controversy, fan edits, and other Signal Anna does not entirely control.

INTERVIEWS · REVIEWS · REPOSTS
CLUB FOOTAGE · CONTROVERSIES · FAN EDITS

ADDED AS THEY ENTER PLAY

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ANNA LOG   ·   DOSSIER   ·   SIGNAL