By Ryan Eykholt

The situation: A room. A dancer. An audience. A radio transmitter. A beat plays with spoken objectives on top. A dancer performs choreography that is beyond their abilities. An audience makes noise when the dancer performs a mistake they would not want repeated. A listener tuning in to the radio broadcast consumes a new composition. A transcript of failure. 

The process Audire! Salire! exploded out of a reflection on the value of mistakes in society, an experiment in improvisation, and an interrogation into corrupt practices within the Big Four accounting firms. Financial audit contributes to a system of enablers that perpetuate excess and error in banks. If external auditors can only make a ‘true and fair’ assessment of financial statement being without fraud, and if auditors inevitably make mistakes, how can creative improvisation change our approach of responding to failures? Audire! Salire! proposes a media architecture of empowerment and accountability. Mixing ingredients of dance, music, and text, this process represents a localized practice space, where mistakes can be identified and interpreted in real-time between a variety of stakeholders.