Leap Space
This is an element developed for the hibernation phase of the project, as a form of bringing sound from the inside to the outside of the building. Instead of reworking the highly synthetic sounds of the Negatum installation for an entirely different situation—four small speakers pointing towards the inner yard and another four pointing towards Trauttmansdorffgasse—I wanted to work entirely with the ambient sound outside the gallery, and to emphasise the notion of sleep.
The basic structure of the piece is simple: an algorithm alternatingly records sounds from either side of the building, reduces their temporal information, and injects it to one of the speakers on the opposite side. Each time, a new sound fragment becomes available, the four channels on the corresponding side of projection are passed onto their neighbouring speakers, dropping the oldest fragment and making room for the new fragment. At one time, one thus synchronously perceives the formerly temporal sequence of four snapshots from the opposite side. The gallery space itself is skipped, sounds leap from one side to the other side of the building, as if two instances communicate with each other across a sleeping body.
The reduction of temporal information is an adaption of the process used in a different sound installation, Accel/Zero-Phase (2016), where sound recordings from a particular spaces had been moved into anther space and subjected to a minimum phase filter, turning temporal articulations into a form of constant reverberation.
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