Nordic Sound Art final exhibition [building day 3 – towards Glossolalia]

I’m here in Roskilde building my final work for the Nordic Sound Art MA-program called Glossolalia in the Roskilde Contemporary Art Museum. Glossolalia is a sound installation / sculpture. It consist of a upside down tree, “growing” from the ceiling made entirely from all kind of black cables (electric, data, audio). On top of the branches of the cable tree are 16 speakers, were sounds are coming from. The aural part of the piece are glossolalia (commonly known speaking in tongues) samples collected from YouTube. A Max/MSP patch is panning the samples through the different branches. The sounds are also phasing between processed and unprocessed states.

Here is an early sketch drawn by Helmi Kajaste of the piece:

 

It is now day tree of building the damn thing. On the first day, Friday 20th of April 2012, I went with the museum people to a scrapyard to get enough cables. I got total of 130 kg, which should be enough.

Here are some of my cables:

And here:

 

I’m using a plumbin pipe as a constructio for the tree trunk. From metal wires I’ll twist the formation for the different branches. I just painted the whole thing black and at the moment it looks like this:

 

This is my exhibition space (notice the early formation of the roots in the ceiling):

 

The opening is next Friday, so I have still six solid working days to finish the thing. I’ll keep documenting how does it progress through the whole process. Tomorrow, I’ll hopefully start to wire the cables from the ceiling to the tree and by Wednesday I should be done with that.