Preemptive Listening

Aura Satz’s inventive documentary, the latest iteration of the artist’s ongoing project on sirens, is sonic collage, design history, and thought experiment in equal measure. Filming in locations as varied as the Fukushima nuclear site in Japan and alert-system assembly lines in the US, Satz considers the siren as a cipher for contemporary ideas of emergency and preparedness. A relic of World War II and Cold War infrastructure, today the siren can be read as a warning sign, a crisis management tool, an emblem of climate collapse—and even, in the age of predictive policing, a threat in and of itself.