The starting point for this piece was visual rather than sonic. When I was in Vancouver I noticed some imaginative ways that people were subverting the Olympics symbol through graffiti, stickers, banners and blogs. But despite the five rings being, as Angus Carlyle puts it, ‘ripe for détournement’, I was unable to find similar graphic subversions on public display here in London. The perimeter wall around the London Olympic site has had so many coats of blue paint that perhaps the graffitists have just given up.

It would seem that the suppression of protest – at least in the form of publicly visible graphics – has been particularly successful in London, and although it may be unlikely the police will use their powers under Section 22 of the London Olympic Games and Games Act 2006 to use “reasonable force” to enter “land or premises” to remove and destroy protest materials, the fact that the legislation exists is worrying evidence of the IOC’s power to “shape a country’s domestic policy, at least in the short term.” (Helen Lenskyj)

Appropriately enough in relation to both the “No Olympics on stolen Native land” campaign and Vancouver’s appropriation of an (arguably inappropriate) Inuit symbol for its logo, the CEO of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for 2010 has reportedly stated that “The five Olympic rings could be used to sell snow to the Eskimos.” There is no doubt that, as George Monbiot put it in the Guardian, “The Games have become a license for land grabs.” And the value for sponsors of having their logos associated with the Olympic brand and of the restrictions on competition within Olympic sites is massive, regardless of how little their products might relate to notions of good health and social responsibility, as in the case of McDonalds.

I was delighted to discover that one of the graphic appropriations of the rings that attracted my attention was by an artist from the same Native community in which I have been working on a new endangered language project. Ange Sterritt is a Gitxsan artist whose graphics have been widely used by the No 2010 campaign, and she has graciously given me permission to include her Wolves not Sheep image in my installation. The image of a figure running from the rings was used extensively by the Bread Not Circuses campaign against Toronto’s bid in 2008, but this and the other graphics remain anonymous, despite my efforts to trace their origins.

Faster Higher Stronger marks the first time I’ve used sounds I have not recorded myself. I have used booing sounds from sound effects libraries to simultaneously give voice to the protests and to reflect some of the aggression that seems to be an integral part of high-level sport and, at times, of its spectators. Sometimes, as George Orwell observed, “Serious sport… is war minus the shooting.”

Running throughout the piece is an electronic tone that seems to rise continuously in pitch. This of course must be an illusion – a sound that truly got higher and higher in pitch would soon go above the range of human hearing and would therefore become inaudible. The tension engendered by the rising tone suggests both the relentless hype that follows the Games around the world and the often unchallenged assumption of the benefits of endless progress in technology, culture and physical performance. The arguably illusory public image of the Games relies heavily on the ideals of goodwill, social development, international peace and brotherhood to mask the underlying commercialism and profiteering of what Christopher Shaw refers to as “the Olympic machine”.