Location and installation
Choosing the right location for installation of a permanent sound art work is crucial for its survival. Sound as a medium can be invasive to everyday activities in the area where the artwork is installed. In a workplace, or in any public space, some people have daily work routines that impose on them to be in a specific area for long periods of time. If this area has prominent sounds in it, it will become annoying over time, for almost everyone, regardless of how much they initially like that sound.
Location of a sound art work must be done with this clearly in mind. At the same time, it would be sad to shove it away somewhere where it is conveniently ignored. In my opinion, tt needs to be located in a position where it can be experienced without the public making a conscious decision to go there and listen. That way it can interact with daily life and be alive in interaction with the intended public.
The equipment is securely stoved away in a separate room..... together with the local supply of paper towels and a dusty Christmas tree
Looking at the Mapping Authorities’ building, I found a walkway/footbridge connecting two blocks. It is a shortcut for traffic between two different subsections of the Mapping Authorities. Here, the sound can be isolated, not bleeding into adjoining office areas, while the area still being actively used due to daily routine traffic. The footbridge has windows all along its length, making it attractive for the use of glass speakers. This kind of speaker transmits sound as vibration into the glass itself, making the glass surface the speaker. Sound is projected both on the inside and the outside, in a spatially diffuse manner (as the whole surface of a window now is the sound source). I wanted to use sound in different spatial positions to help differentiate and untangle the sometimes very dense data structures of VLBI, and at the same time the spatialization enhances the experience of envelopment of sound. The feeling of envelopment makes the sound act more as a natural source of the environment, as opposed to the sound of “a single speaker in a corner”, which obviously can be experienced as an artificial addendum.
For this installation I used a 12 channel glass speaker system, with speaker positions distributed over the length of the footbridge.
