Technique: piano wire, high frequency square waves, piezo speakers, amplifier, cd player

Rue du Nord
http://ruedunord.org/
Lausanne, Switzerland

February 12–14, 2009

Jack Straw New Media Gallery
http://jackstraw.org
Seattle, USA

January 31–March 28, 2008

Q-O2 Werkplaats
http://q-o2.be
Brussels, Belgium

November 28–30, 2007

In the Q-O2 Werkplaats exhibition space I spanned eight steel wires at a height of three meters from the floor. Each wire was threaded through a piezo loudspeaker, which emitted a square wave of 4000 hz (this being the frequency which I found best resonated the wires in the space).

Though resonated by the same frequency square wave each wire vibrated at a different rate, due to the fact that none of the wires were spanned with an identical tension across the space. The effect of this was a subtle movement of sound across the exhibition space, changing as visitors walked about the space.

For this installation I was interested in working with sound in a plastic sense: as in a work of sculpture, its presence in a space changes how we perceive that space; and as we move about the space so also changes our pereception of the sculpture.

The resonatng wires changed how we perceived the exhibition space, in that as we moved about the space the sound also changed, allowing the visitor to experience the space itself as a plastic entity, molding itself to our changing vantage point.

A later version of this work for the Jack Straw New Media Gallery in Washington, USA used additional tin cans affixed to the ends of the wires. The cans served as resonators. Due to the size of the exhibition space only four I only used four wires.

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