230 Unwanted Speakers
(Walnut Grained Vinyl Veneered Particleboard Construction)
This 17-channel site specific sound installation was made for Hull Art Lab. Like its predecessor, Fallender ton für 207 lautsprecher boxen, it made use of the aural equivalent of an optical illusion, although this time instead of a constantly falling tone, an apparently endlessly rising set of tones was used. The sounds circulating around the outer speakers were synthesised in situ in response to the ambient sounds in and around this former potato warehouse and were designed to blur the boundaries between the real and the synthetic. The sounds used on the central speakers were 'pure' sine tones edited and arranged for 8 channel diffusion.
The undoubted ‘personalities’ of the speakers, their arrangement into what Berlin curator Wolfgang Schlegel described as “a field of social tension” and the dramatic suspension of the huge speaker overhead strongly point to various metaphors and narratives, but the meaning of the piece is left to the visitor to interpret. As was the case in Berlin, interpretations like the above quote from the Daily Mail abounded.