Interior - site specific installation

Interior was a site specific installation that formed part of the group exhibition Another Movement, 8th – 17th October, 2004, in Ti’s Hall, Kanazawa, Japan.

Another Movement is an artists' collective in Kanazawa who co-ordinated an exhibition where a number of artists work in individual spaces across the city. The artist was the only non Japanese involved and chose the most “gallery-like” space available in a modern building - the alternatives were mostly traditional Japanese buildings where the building
construction was such that any use of sound would have been an imposition on neighbours, an important consideration, even more significant in Japanese culture.

The choice of this space was also an exploration of installation within spaces which have much less natural reverberation.

In the space are two microphones and four loudspeakers. Otherwise the space is empty. The sound of the space is magnified, amplified in real time. The double system of microphones and loudspeakers created a harmonically interdependent cycle of pitches which drift in and out of phase, modulated by the physical presence of the spectator. The movement and sound of people within the space produced a quantifiable and identifiable response from the behaviour of the installation as the
physical presence of the spectator modulates the pitches in the space by disrupting room reflections, other noise made within the space is picked up by the microphones and amplified through the system - the magnified sound of a room.

What the work had to achieve was to shift the focus of the viewer towards the sound without imposition - apart from the bare minimum of equipment the space was empty. Objects within the space make whatever subtlety is present in the sound invisible in the sense that although the work is still audible the focus of the viewer is distracted.