Play Misty for Me, Siri and The End of Side B : Kieran Boland

Up next in the video space is artist Kieran Boland's simultaneous display of works Play Misty for Me, Siri (2021) and The End of Side B  (2025), curated by Brie Trenerry.

Play Misty for Me, Siri (2021) juxtaposes the servitude implied by Apple’s default female voice for Siri with the controlled, minimal, reductionist masculinity of Clint Eastwood as the overnight radio DJ in the film Play Misty for Me. Drawing on the field of acousmatic (unseen) sound, the work reflects on how the human voice—once a marker of individuality—has become increasingly mediated, erased, and remade by the systems that transmit it. Playing on the dual meaning of the “siren” as a voice that calls, a machine that warns, and a figure of seduction that leads astray, it considers how technology blurs the line between intimacy and insanity.

Kieran writes, "In August 2017, I drove from San Francisco to Los Angeles with the voice of Siri guiding my every move. I would have been lost without her. As I approached the small but affluent town of Carmel by the Sea I said, “Play Misty for me, Siri”. My request echoed the fictional character of Evelyn, who was in the habit of ringing the radio DJ within the 1971 film, Play Misty for Me to request Misty, Erroll Garner's 1954 jazz standard. “Which one?” Siri replied, “I found five.” Siri took me to a house perched on a cliff above the ocean at 162 Spindrift Road. The film directed by and starring Clint Eastwood as Dave Garver, the DJ at the local radio station KRML, opens with a helicopter shot that takes us along the coastline to the rear of that address—where Clint Eastwood gazes past his reflection in a window towards an unfinished oil painting of himself. In the penultimate scene, Evelyn criticises the painting before slashing it repeatedly with a kitchen knife. The eyes are wrong, she says. They aren’t cold enough. Soon afterwards, her lifeless body will lay on the rocky shoreline below. Had the hyper-masculine voice carried by radio waves each night driven her mad before she had even laid eyes on DJ Dave? Discovering Clint Eastwood likes to recite the Greek alphabet to calm his nerves seemed to give some credence to the spurious associations with ancient Greek myth I had developed—in this instance, a gender reversal of Ulysses and the sirens. Lucio Fontana’s slashings had also sprung to mind; his manifestos repudiating the illusory or "virtual" space of painting, along with his disavowal of the enduring physical work of art in favour of a performative gesture of violence. I recalled the miraculous reversal of the moral and physical decay that was wirelessly transmitted to the picture of Dorian Gray—a reversal that occurred only when its subject had attempted to slash it—an act that coincided with his long overdue death. I tuned into KRML while I was there but heard only a sea of static. Perhaps the Pythagorean veil of radio had held some subconscious lesson reserved for the initiated. A couple of days later I was staying in Death Valley with Justin, a former theatre director. He’d sent me long-winded instructions on how to find his place, featuring numerous descriptions of landmarks and signs to look out for. I was warned about using Siri or any other sat nav system in the desert on account of the scarcity of mobile towers within the barren landscape. I couldn’t resist the temptation to check in with her a couple of times out of curiosity. He was right. Siri was a siren that would have led me to oblivion."

The End of Side B (2025) unfolds as a monologue for insomniacs at the close of a fictitious community radio graveyard-shift just before dawn. Framed as an atmospheric listening exercise with a trace of absurdist humour, it drifts through a disorienting soundscape where memory, technology, fatigue, and the subconscious intersect at the edges of perception. The monologue slyly proposes to the solitary listener that the soundscape surrounding them is not entirely live but augmented by an unseen background tape playing somewhere in the distance. This “tape recorder at the end of the world” runs for twenty-four hours across two unprecedented twelve-hour-long sides: Side A devoted to daylight sounds, Side B to nocturnal ones. First presented publicly as a sound piece voiced by the artist in 2023 for an overnight radio art project broadcast in Montréal, Canada, the new iteration at MARS—featuring Melbourne-based actor Rebecca Lee Bower as the graveyard-shift radio host—gives visual form to the graveyard shift’s dislocated sense of time.