Marcel Cobussen
Perchance wrongly, I assume that you, reader, have not visited ZKM’s exhibition Sound Art: Klang als Medium der Kunst. Your first encounter with Robert Pugliese’s ‘Equilibrium’ might thus very well be through this text and the accompanying soundfile above to which you hopefully have listened or are listening right now.
What do you hear? To what are you listening, specifically? What are your experiences? Are you first of all focused on the sound qualities? Are you primarily listening to the ADSR envelopes, the attack, decay, sustain, and release of the sounds? To the rhythms, the different sonic layers, the repetition of the sonic materials? Or are you trying to find out what the sources of the sounds are? Which things can produce these sounds? Are you perhaps trying to attribute some meaning to what you hear? What do the sounds signify? Or are you more interested in how these sounds affect you, in what is happening on a psycho-acoustic level?
The reason I ask you all this may be slightly rhetorical. Relistening to the recorded sounds on my PC, I am ambivalent about the experience, pendulating between fascination and ennui, between expectant longing and unfulfilled desire. As if the sounds as sounds are not completely sufficient to keep my attention. Is this reaction which ‘Equilibrium’ provokes symptomatic of other sound art works too? They do use or contain sounds, but the works are not meant to be only listened to. They try to engage more senses, and isolating one – albeit the most obvious, perhaps the most important one – does injustice to these works. Much sound art appeals to what Veit Erlmann discusses in his contribution to Hearing Cultures: “It makes scientific sense to conceive of the senses as an integrated and flexible network” (Erlmann 2004: 4).
Using mechanical equipments driven by software that interact with the surrounding environment and the user, I intend to examine new points of research to the phenomena attached to sound, analysis of the processes that use the human psyche structures to differentiate natural from artificial ones (both acoustic and visual), on the relationship between man and technology and the relationship between art and technology, giving a role no less important to the visual aspect.
(http://www.robertopugliese.com/page50/page50.html, my emphasis)
This is how Roberto Pugliese himself thinks about his work. It evidences an orientation toward the ear and the eye, the audible as well as the visual, to both acoustic and visual means of expression. And perhaps it is fair to include the tactile too, as the visitor needs to activate the whole installation by moving in front of a small security camera; without the visitor’s movement, this installation remains inactive.
However, the question arises if the sonic tastes defeat: will we listen or will we see what is happening? Will we try to find out how the camera sets off the feedback process, or will we attentively listen to all differences in the feedback system? Is our audible orientation still subsidiary to the visual?
Judge for yourself …
References
Erlmann, Veit (2005). Hearing Cultures. Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity. Oxford: Berg.
Pugliese, Roberto. http://www.robertopugliese.com
Vincent Meelberg
Equilibrium (2011), by Roberto Pugliese, is an example of a sound artwork whose interactivity is fairly simple, while the work itself is anything but simplistic. It consists of a wall filled with tiny speakers. In front of each speaker a robot arm is placed, carrying a microphone that is directed at the speaker. If a visitor walks along the wall, the robot arms are lifted one by one, following the movement of the visitor, thereby creating sonic feedback caused by the microphones picking up the sounds emitted by the speakers and feeding these sounds back to them. As a result, interaction is made visible as well as being sonified, exemplified even, by the sonic feedback. It makes audible what interaction is: an action by an entity, picked up by an other entity and which results in a change of behavior in that entity, a change which in turn affects the behavior of the entity that was responsible for the initial action.
Moreover, the way the arms moved also contributed to the complexity of the work. These movements were not smooth, but stuttery, hesitant almost. It seemed as if the robot arms were afraid to interact, because they knew what would happen if they did: noise would be the result. In other words: Equilibrium also shows the possible dangers of interaction, and the doubts this might cause with entities that are about to interact.
Sharon Stewart
Feedback, on one hand, forms the nemesis of certain recording/performance situations: the nails on the blackboard turn into lion’s claws that turn into pickaxes that finally rip the whole blackboard apart. An escalation of force reminiscent of the tendency towards stronger and stronger retaliation, until the only thing left (to be heard) is the monolithic wasteland of the dominant force (voice).[1]
Feedback, on the other hand, is a self-generating miracle of something coming from nothing: the slightest vibration (merest input excitation) whirls itself from membrane to membrane at the light speed of electromagnetic waves into a sound that, when regulated, demonstrates some… well… rather varied and interesting… well… you can play with it in a number of ways, and a wide variety of artists have.
Roberto Pugliese developed software that “places the robotic arms in the space in a dynamic manner, thus controlling the distance from the speakers to prevent the system from going into saturation.” In this way, as reads Pugliese’s website, “each micro system seeks – without finding it – its own equilibrium, which is physically impossible to obtain.” As I slowly and, in my perception, quietly move alongside this exhibit, I, in subtle impulses, set waves, forces, in motion.[2] With the choice to move, I relinquish control of the system that I am triggering to the system itself. There is no choice but to trust the regulating devices, the software, the mechanical structures designed keep the system in balance. Can I trust this system? Can I trust its designer? Can I move without causing it to move? What damage will be done if the system cannot regulate itself: My eardrums, or “only” the speaker membranes? How can I challenge the system?
I read the hesitating, delicate movements of the arms as somehow trustworthy. They seem to be diligently and conscientiously doing their never-ending job: bringing themselves in feedback response to minimal sound impulses while at the same time keeping my eardrums and their membranes intact.
[1] In a Ted Talk, The real reason for brains, neurologist Daniel Wolpert discusses research assessing the phenomenon of the escalation of physical force (beginning at approximately 12:45).
[2] I was told later by one of my very observant colleagues that a motion-detection camera was located on the floor on one side of Equilibrium and that this is what was triggering the installation to begin moving. This was rather disappointing to me, as it meant that the whole exhibit was set into motion through a visual rather than audible stimulus, thus making part of my interpretation of the work, as interactive based on sound, illusory. Searching the Internet, however, I could find no mention of such a camera as part of the actual workings of the installation. Most likely the camera works as an on/off switch, turning the installation on when a visitor walks by, because otherwise the installation would be in “constant motion” (due to the presence of ambient noise, which triggers at least one microphone/speaker combination to start producing feedback, which then triggers the rest) as stated on the description of the ZKM website. However, the initial excitation source – whether sound triggers motion or the vibration of motion triggers sound – is still a mystery to me.
Jan Nieuwenhuis
As you can see in the video, Roberto Pugliese’s Equilibrium consists of several microphones mounted on robotic arms attached to the horizontal platform of an L-shaped support made of plexiglass. A speaker cone is attached to the vertical side of this support. When I observe the work from a distance, it is silent. But when I come into the vicinity, the microphone arms start to move. Slowly, hesitantly, they approach their respective speaker cones. A soft sound arises, and the microphone moves a little bit sideways, slightly to the left, then a bit to the right and back again. It lingers in front of the membrane, producing a soft hiss that increases in volume. When the microphone approaches the cone more closely, feedback is produced. The sound increases, approaching saturation, at which point the microphone suddenly retreats. This process is repeated over and over by each of the microphones, each of them infinitely in pursuit of its equilibrium.
As long as I am around, the microphones will continue this process. I am like the demon that asks them (and myself) "do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" (Nietzsche 1974: 274). I look and listen closely to them as they continually reconsider this question. Despite the fact that, according to Nietzsche, this question is the greatest burden – because it is posed with every action one makes – the microphones keep on repeating their action. In my (anthropomorphized) reading of their motives, they desire the recurrence of their striving; they “crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal” (Nietzsche 1974: 274).
According to Jos de Mul, we can glean from Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of the same, “that repetition opens the dimension of the endless little moment that Nietzsche announced as a higher reality and truth, which, according to him, flashes into existence from the eternal flood of Becoming (KSA, 9: 502)” (De Mul 1999: 140). I experience this moment while listening to Pugliese’s Equilibrium. It is a constant flux of sounds that grows stronger or fades away. I am completely focused on how the texture of hisses unfolds itself. I do not focus on what has been or what is to come. Instead I listen to the present moment of the sound, absorbed in the process of becoming, from which the endless little moment that is “the complete affirmation of the here and now” (De Mul 1999: 140) emerges.
The microphones desire the recurrence of their striving: one by one they constantly produce feedback up to the saturation point and pull back. The microphones’ desire, however, is not a Freudian lack, but a productive desire, because “desire is man’s very essence, insofar as it is conceived to be determined, from any given affection of it, to do something” (Spinoza 1996: 104). And “‘the essence of something’, according to Spinoza, is ‘the striving [conatus] by which each thing strives to persevere in its being’” (Spinoza 1996: 75, quoted in Schrift 2000: 176).
In light of the above, it is not the saturation point that is desirable for the microphones, but rather desire itself. They desire desire, because desire is the essence of their striving by which they strive. This results in their loop of eternal retreat. When they pull back, the microphones regain the position from which they can once again recommence striving to persevere in their being. If desire, regarded as the driving force to act, strives to persevere in its being, desire desires itself – “alle Lust will sich selber” (Nietzsche 1999: 403) – eternally: “Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit” (Nietzsche 1999: 404).
References
De Mul, Jos (1999). Romantic Desire in (Post)modern Art & Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974). The Gay Science. (trans. Walter Kaufmann). New York: Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1999). Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe IV: Also Sprach Zarathustra. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.
Schrift, Alan D. (2000). “Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze: An Other Discourse of Desire”. In Hugh J. Silverman (ed.), Philosophy & Desire (pp. 173-185). New York: Routledge.
Spinoza, Benedict de (1996). Ethics. (trans. Edwin Curly) London: Penguin Books.