Silent Music 1994-95

Installation with several hundred wall-mounted piezo loudspeakers and tape or computer-controlled MIDI instruments.

Presentations: Alte Schmiede, Vienna; Helpoort, Maastricht; Warsaw Centre of Contemporary Art (Ujazdowski Castle); Het Apollohuis, Eindhoven.

Silent Music is an installation consisting of between 100 and 500 high-frequency "piezo" loudspeakers. Together with their attached wires these loudspeakers form plant-like structures, placed within the space to suggest either their seeking of light or their preference for lighted areas. The work is conceived for installation in either quiet public areas or exhibition spaces. The sounds of the installation are designed to colour the silence of the existing space.

The work broadcasts high, relatively quiet sounds made up of a mixture of natural and synthetic sources (sounds may be reminiscent of hearing the ocean from a great distance, of a light wind blowing through leaves, of water flowing somewhere nearby...). These high-frequency sounds and broadband noises are sometimes static in space, they sometimes move in slow waves across the installation area.

Just as this aural experience presents a mixture of natural and synthetic elements, so does the visual. Although the work is composed solely of loudspeakers and loudspeaker wire, these are placed in a manner which suggests life, growth and movement toward light. The work inhabits the space in much the same way as would plants. At the same time it projects the observer back and forth between perceptions of the familiar and the unfamiliar: between that which we perceive as being natural and alive and that which we perceive as being technical and artificial.

Silent Music, Alte Schmiede, Vienna.
July 1995.
(Photo: P.A. Leitner)