Memini, '99-'01
sound work, click on the image for an mp3
memini was commissioned by the Center for Art and Technology at Connecticut College for the CAT conference in March of ‘99. The work involves the placement of multiple sound emitting, and broadcasting stations designed to blend into their environment visually and sonically. The sounds emitted from the objects were created from ambient recordings made at the site of the installation, and then edited and processed via Csound, soundhack, and Argeiphontes Lyre. At a central location there is a listening station, where all of the individual sounds are mixed live. Within the listening room are images of the containers (often metal boxes) taken in another context – the roof of my building in New York, for example. Information about the listening room is placed casually around the location of the boxes and listening room, with minimal specificity regarding the connections between the external devices and the sounds in the listening room.
The piece explores how sounds are (or not) archived by the mind without being assigned to a specific, available memory or context, and how these sounds, absent of a meaningful context, may exist as memory “traces”, or potential recollections in the mind, and, under certain circumstances may be brought together to form specific memories if specific, unifying information is presented to a listener at a later time.
The experiences of the piece have ranged from not making any connection between the sounds in the listening room and the external sound objects, to realizing the scope of the work either while in the listening room or elsewhere – sometimes much later, after the installation has been de-installed.
Here
is an mp3 mix from an installation at the Santa Fe Festival of Electro-Acoustic
Music '99. During this installation the weather was
particularly warm, and windows were open in many of the interior spaces where
I placed components of the piece, including the listening room. I recorded many
hours of sound, and noticed that birds outside the listening room began to imitate
the sound of a creaking door broadcast from the interior of a neighboring building.