Curated by Nida Ghouse, this work is a 120 minute ambisonic piece created in 2019. It deals with the archeology of a site through its sounds. The piece was comprised of sound artworks from seven different sound artists, and rendered to the auditorium by two sound artists and myself. A group of set designers built an environment that reacted to visual shifts in the room. The created space had a symbolic altitude and functioned as a disguised seating arena.

I found great possibility in taking directional input primarily from sound, and reacting to that with a number of LED tiles, limited to warm and cold white light. I worked intuitively based on a setup of haptic tools, fed back to the lighting system of the museum. The LED tiles being the primary light source to the space, the only outstanding visual impulse and one
of the dominant media perceptible in the room, there was much space to play. 

The palette was perceived broader than it was, as I could address all tiles individually. All relative values of hues and saturation was perceived as an unique color palette supported with only a small number of special lights in the room. The spatial rendering of sound and light made the room animated, and gave the audio piece a new incentive.

My work has been generously technically supported by Eduardo Abdala.

Photo: Laura Fiorio

contributors and in collaboration with Umashankar Manthravadi, Bani Abidi, Mojisola Adebayo, Vinit Agarwal, Sukhesh Arora, Anurima Banerji, Lilia Di Bella, Moushumi Bhowmik, Madhuri Chattopadyay, Padmini Chettur, Arunima Chowdhury, Emese Csornai, Padma Damodaran, Hugo Esquinca, Jenifer Evans, Eunice Fong, Tyler Friedman, Janardan Ghosh, Brooke Holmes, Alexander Keefe, Sukanta Majumdar, Robert Millis, Farah Mulla, Rita Sonal Panjatan, Ayaz Pasha, TJ Rehmi, RENU, Uzma Z. Rizvi, Sara, Yashas Shetty, The Travelling Archive, Maarten Visser and others.

Video excerpt: