YOU ARE HERE
Loudspeakers, wire, amplifier, copper, wood. 2006
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YOU ARE HERE
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Loudspeakers, wire, amplifier, copper, wood. 2006
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| YOU ARE HERE is an interactive sound sculpture. The piece consists of 114 loudspeakers in a radial projection on the floor, approx. 7.5m in diameter (see drawing). There is a small control panel laid out as a map of the speakers with a contact corresponding to each speaker and an electrode with which the audience can activate the piece by pointing at the map. Each 30cm speaker contains a dozen white grains and when the electrode completes the circuit, recorded text plays from the selected speaker(s) causing the grains to jump. The audience controls this large visual and audio field stretching out in front of them, completing a tactile relationship of micro to macro.
The piece is a meditation on mapping and the distance between the model of the world that we have in our heads and the physical manifestation of it around us; the subjective inside the objective, like Rene Daumal’s protagonist in La Grande Beuverie who finds himself inside the tower of his own head, peeking out the eyeholes at a world that is always beyond touching, the ox of the self contained as a separate individual inside a giant unwieldy mechanical body. There are two mappings of the text: the figurative and the literal. The viewer’s control panel is a figurative map, which grants access to an abstracted gesture. “I point to the spot, the spot represents something distant, out of scale, outside the dream of myself”. At the same instant the full size map of the literal world, the surface of the body, is activated, analyzing our distance from all action, and even from our own skins. I have been working with the loudspeaker as an icon of contemporary information flow, and the forced, passive dialog it often provokes. In this piece the viewer is given the power to mediate the dialog, as the text can be interrupted and recomposed by maneuvering the electrode. It is important to me that the technology driving this piece be simple and overt. The magic trick of revelation is provoked within the viewer, not inside a computerized controller. © 2007 Douglas Henderson |