2023 Interactive and generative sound installation. The Big Cellar Collective. Porthmeor Studios. |
'The receiver gave out a buzz of a kind K. had never before heard on a telephone. It was like the hum of countless childrens voices-but yet not a hum, the echo rather of voices singing at an infinite distance-blended by sheer impossibility into one high but resonant sound which vibrated on the ear as if it were trying to penetrate beyond mere hearing.' Kafka The Castle
We have created an interactive and generative sound installation inspired by Kafka's extraordinary description of a telephone call in his last novel The Castle using the audio program Supercollider 3. Participants are invited to listen and contribute to an intriguing composition through the use of an early twentieth century wall based telephone.
The composition attempts to express the ethereal nature of the sounds described by Kafka and the sense of bureaucratic disconnection and alienation that the telephone call induces in the main character K. Participants will be asked to sing into the phone and then listen to their voice becoming part of the sound composition.
They will experience hearing their own voice coalesce into the song like composition; a voice that disappears and remerges subtly transformed to sound other than themselves and perhaps evoking an 'infinite distance'. The work attempts to create a dream-like mix of qualities, of dislocation, estrangement and wonder.
The installation explores the idea of the individual voice within a system; how voices, are merged, coalesce and to some extent are subsumed into a collective body. It conveys the fracturing nature of this experience while also manifesting an uncanny and at times even wonderous quality.
Kafkas Telephone sound sample 1
Kafkas Telephone sound sample 2
Kafkas Telephone sound sample 3