in Fear Eats the Soul, differentiated voices are absorbed into communications infrastructure until the system of transmission becomes the encounter. Presented at New Adventures in Sound Art (Toronto, Canada), Eastern Bloc / Salon DATA II (Montreal, Canada), and Artists' Television Access (San Francisco, CA), the work employs software to transcribe in real time the complete dialogue of the two main protagonists of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's German Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974) into Morse code, producing a sound and light composition expressed as two LED obstacle lights and an FM radio audio transmission. One flashing light represents Ali, the Moroccan immigrant; the other represents Emmi, the older working-class German woman whose relationship is systematized by the racial, national, class, and generational divisions of Cold War West Germany. In reducing speech to signal, the work locates separation not simply between Ali and Emmi but within the systems through which they become legible to one another.