Its not unusual for us to be followed by our shadow, our dog or even by some lunatic, but the sounds that exist around us don’t as a rule behave in such a way and certainly not for long periods. They exist completely independently of us or else if we do indeed make them, then they refuse to stick to us, impervious to our movements. However this is not the case when entering Magdalena Pederin’s work “The Circle”, where sound does infact do precisely that, moving together with the visitor, following him or her around in circles.
The work itself comprises of an eight channel interactive sound installation consisting of eight loudspeakers, arranged in a circle marking the field of interaction. The loudspeakers become devices that react to the movements the visitors make, which according to the author, results in a “rather impersonal, machine-like sound as if from an oscillator/generator of sound, which sounds like machines themselves generated it. Sound that infact could be seen to represent what inside the machine would sound like.
The other characteristic of this sound is that it spreads like a virus. The sound of the machine moves from one loudspeaker to another depending on the direction the visitor moves in, with a maximum of 4 loudspeakers being able to follow that movement at the same time. In that way, the visitors compose the sound field in which each of them has added a different sound dimension. As Niall Lucy says “Sounds are never simply something we just hear; we never just listen to sounds. We don’t just listen, because there are no sonic objects to listen to. There are only sonic events. …a sound is a corporeal event“.
Given that it is a physical event which one feels with one’s whole body, in Magdalena Pederin’s sound installation “The Circle”, it is necessary for the owner of that body to also be involved in the work, by moving around to create a sound ambience in relation to the machine and the other visitors. And when one considers the positioning of the loudspeakers themselves, then the whole work seems a lot like a technological version of some Neolithic place of worship, in which the perverse illusion that technology itself can communicate with us, appears to be real.
Text by: Suncica Ostoic, Olga Majcen, kontejner.org
