Writing (suspend) (2023)

Sound installation with a ring of 48 suspended Petri-dishes and piezo speakers, sensors, motors, graphite.

Beginning in 2011 with Writing Machine, over the years I have created a number of related sound installations that share the Writing… title and a somewhat intimate circular arrangement of Petri dishes. They emanate voices and sounds under an algorithmic regime of continuous rewriting. In each iteration, the work absorbs new and different elements while letting go of others. The installation Writing (suspend) was created for the exhibition ‘Like an Open Door: The Construction Site as Potential’ with <rotor> and NOS Visual Arts Production.

Writing (suspend) (room rec.)
 

The ‘suspension’ in the work’s title can be read very directly, since the glasses here are suspended from thin wires, forming a circle of 224cm diameter at ear level in the room. The circle’s centre is empty but inaccessible, requiring the audience to walk around the outer perimeter. More abstractly, suspension also refers to the inherent algorithmic construction which never approaches any particular target, but the sound gestures are continually rewritten using their own inner dynamic of similarities among their sonic features, thus enacting an aimless drift across time.

As in previous iterations, the sound is emitted from the lids of the Petri dishes, which are coupled to piezo elements using coarse black nails partially buried in graphite powder inside the dishes. Alluding to Writing (simultan), the room is subtly tinted in a green colour.

The piece plays with the ability to observe this aimless movement. Three types of sounds are perceivable. Most readily recognised are voices that are tied to individual pairs of glasses, thus providing twenty-four different voices. All voices speak a language unlikely to be recognised by the audience, as these are languages threatened by extinction. Instead of decoding the semantic level, one can focus on the individual quality of the voice, at the same time as as one makes out a commonality of human speech, ‘humanness’, across all twenty-four voices. Subtly controlled by sensors, wind-like sound waves swell and ebb across varying sectors of the ring. These static timbres are formed from the resonances of the voices, that is after removing their temporal-rhythmic qualities. The third sound is a mechanical sound, as small motors on the ceiling set the pairs of glasses into an oscillating motion, following the circle sector by sector, as the computer calculates new sounds. The motors produce a rattling sound not unlike the pattern of mechanical relays used in previous iterations.

A hybrid between the compositions of the previous pieces, in Writing (suspend) the ‘same’ sound gesture is passed around in the circle, but the sound fragments injected at each sector are taken from the individual corpus of each cell, that is, from a speaker and language tied to that sector. Using the open source Endangered Languages Archive, I selected four recordings from each of the six continents, divided into approximately equal proportions of female and male presenting voices. Originally, these voices would narrate local stories that the ethnographers registered. Here, the diversity and richness of languages come to the foreground and set the audience on an imaginary travel.