pan-terrestrial people’s anthem is a series of compositions and a book of poetry created entirely from remixing the songs and lyrics of 195 national anthems. the music is constructed from sampling fragments of all anthems to build up an assemblage of sonic layers that transcend established geopolitical boundaries.

•track 1: the flag designs of 195 countries are randomly selected and combined to make the hybrid flags in this video.

•track 2: the text in this video comes from references to time in the lyrics of national anthems. it takes the entire line of text and combines it with other time references from different anthem lyrics.

•track 3: sound and poetry by andrew demirjian, data visualization by james proctor. every set of two letters becomes a pair of coordinates. the position value of the letter is it’s order in the alphabet, mapped to latitude and longitude. the text comes from two consecutive words that start with the same letter. the audio track is a 4-channel sound composition formatted to stereo, the video version is formatted to ambisonic audio. pan the 360º sound by moving the video image left and right.

•track 4: one of the initial songs composed for this project that was created for a performance in ohio.

•track 5: keyboard and drum machine only combinations of anthems.

•track 6: the audio track is a 4-channel sound composition formatted to stereo, the video version is formatted to ambisonic audio. pan the 360º sound by moving the video image left and right.

•track 7: this piece is made from the last few notes of dozens of national anthems. the flag designs of 195 countries are randomly selected and combined to make the hybrid flags in this video.

•track 8: ami yamasaki -vocals. ami interprets one of the snowball poems from the book comprised of anthem lyrics. the audio track is a 4-channel sound composition formatted to stereo, the video version is formatted to ambisonic audio. pan the 360º sound by moving the video image left and right.

•track 9: one of the initial songs composed for this project that was created for a performance in ohio.

•track 10: the audio track is a 4-channel sound composition formatted to stereo, the video version is formatted to ambisonic audio. pan the 360º sound by moving the video image left and right.

•book: the poetry in the book is created with multiple constraint systems to navigate and filter the database of over 27,523 words from anthem lyrics. some poems are built from entering search terms on topics like ‘navigation’, ‘time’, ‘sound’ and combining lyrics from different songs by topic. in other instances, the entire database of words is broken up by word length (one character words, two-character words, three-character words, etc.) and reorganized as poems that grow from one to ten letter word phrases creating lyrics for a new hybrid anthem not centered on any one country.

35 pages, color
usa $20
international $25
prices include shipping and handling

the photographs used in the making of this artwork are licensed under a creative commons attribution 2.0 generic license. the images are attributed to derek bridges, wonderlane, paul stein, dmitry dzhus and paul sapiano.