I’ve spent a wonderful weekend in Berlin, zigzaging the city to visit the various sonambiente locations. The festival for hearing and seeing featured a superb exhibition, which showed the works of more than 50 renowned artists along with works by 20 up-and-coming art school talents.
Here’s a small selection:
Kris Vleeschouwer had installed a monumental Glass Works: two large racks, five meters high and ten meters long, filled with 10 000 glass bottles and containers. A piston mechanism moves up and down and from left to right in these racks. This system is linked via an ADSL system with five glass recyling containers around the city. Whenever someone throws glass into these recycling containers, glass is pushed out of the racks in the exhibition: the sound of breaking glass at the exhibit site is the result of an innocent act occurring somewhere in the city. A film in the exhibition space allows visitors to observe the glass containers in the city on five video monitors in real time. but even when nothing was happening the piece was mesmerizing.
I nearly missed the funny Death’s Voice Breathing!, by Werner Reiterer, hanging as it was from the ceiling over the visitors’ heads. Wrapped in plastic film, a loudspeaker box was exhaling in panic, visibly struggling for air, in the process constantly blowing up the plastic sack around it, then pulling it in with a deep inhalation. The loudspeaker box fights for its survival on behalf of all protagonists, and so acquires human characteristics.
Death’s Voice Breathing! and Sunlight for Sound Pillows
Sunlight for Sound Pillows, by Maria Blondeel, consists of blue pillows with built-in loudspeakers, featuring sonic recordings of sunlight. The sound pillow allows the visitor to relax for a moment on a couch covered with a silver rescue cloth.
Plan de Poche 2004, by Donatella Landi, is a series of CDs that form a sonic map of the Paris Underground with 18 itineraries: each sound excursion started up at street level; then came the sounds of the passengers’ steps going downstairs and through the long passages and corridors underground, the wait on the platform, the arrival of the trains, their stops, and the re-emergence into the visible part of the city. Each sound journey lasts as long as the actual trip.
Tom’s Song, by Joanna Dudley, is a huge wooden container. Part of the charm of the installation came from the magnificent room it was occupying inside the Old Polish Embassy. Inside the container, visitors could walk among vintage portable LP players and their speakers while music boxes with their pianola-like paper scores were hanging down from the ceiling.
Each music box and LP player have their own part to play in the mechanical orchestra whose role is to accompany the one LP of Tom singing his song and accompanying himself on the ukulele.
Every LP player has its own specifically composed LP. Whistled harmonies. The hanging music box scores are paper cards punctured with holes and fed through the metal teeth of the music boxes. Each music box plays its own composed score as well to create an accompanying orchestra for Tom’s song. Mechanically operated, each LP player and music box starts at the same time. Once each instrument has come to the end of its own score, they collectively re-start to play it over again.
More Sonambiente fun: Click Opera, Structural Pattern; Fades, Listening soccer balls, Wearable rhythm communicator.