There’s an urgency to keep art making safe from AI and its ability to steal anything its sticky fingers can grab in the digital realm. But how can we share sound across space and time, outside of the Internet? Let’s return to a technology that mirrors the phenomenon of a physical object containing a hidden multiverse of sonic delight: the cassette tape.

The Golden Tape is a mixtape of human wonderment. On each tape is a collection of artists sharing their human essence: secretive and beloved delights, pleasures, grief, ritual, desires, and emotions that inform our humanity. They allow you to overhear the sacred spaces, thoughts, and emotions that the fake brains (aka AI) could only wish to emulate. Tapes will be hidden throughout the festival venues. Grab one, take it to the Tape Library, and listen to these treasures. When you’re finished, please take the tape home as a memento of the festival, and a reminder to embrace embodied human contact and resist AI commodification!

Kristina Loring is a story editor, sound artist, and audio educator who works across genre and form to create media experiences you feel in your body. She was the founding Head of Audio at Dipsea, a feminist audio erotica app that the New Yorker praised for "creating a new genre." Before that, she created the interactive cooking show Cooking By Ear. She’s the editor of the award-winning podcast The Stoop, a show about Blackness, race, and identity in America. Her work has appeared on The BBC’s program Between the Ears and ShortCuts, KCRW/McSweeney’s Unfictional podcast, among others.

Her immersive sound performance Punk Angels (2024) was featured as part of the Maine Performing Arts Exhibition, and her sound installation, Message in a Bottle (2021) was appeared at the Sound Scene Festival in partnership with the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum. She's taught genre-bending narrative audio workshops to audiences in Canada, Colombia, England, Ireland, Italy, Germany, and the U.S.
www.kristinaloring.com

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