Field Notes: The Media School Travel Blog

This week I attended the seventh annual HEAR Now Festival in Kansas City with several other students. We heard about different types of audio work and talked to professionals in the field.  

One of the presentations I attended was Alex Kirt’s, where he presented the Gatling-O-Phone, a project he has been working on for years.  

The machine is technically a record player, but it is built to look like a Gatling gun. He’s used different items to bring the machine together and keep it functioning. There is a lever on the back that he can turn to record at whatever pace and tempo he would like. This allows it to function as an instrument, which helps Kirt present his originally produced records. We listened to four records with varying topics, including gun violence, MAGA culture and racism.  

He produces these records by clipping together different media clips while repeating key phrases. He made this machine to show how the mainstream media present stories to us as a whole and therefore push their own kinds of propaganda into the world.  

Listening to Alex speak about how and why he made the Gatling-O-Phone and then hearing the actual performance was inspiring. It made me want to push myself and think outside of the box when working on future projects. Speeding up different sections of news clips while slowing down others changed the pieces entirely.  

If you ever get the chance to see this live, you should give it a shot. But if that isn’t possible, you can watch performances on YouTube.

So look out for Alex Kirt’s Gatling-O-Phone.