- Artist
- Nicole L’Huillier
- Year
- 2019
- Medium
- Travelling sonic sculpture. Installed at ALICE Experiment at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland; the ALMA Observatory OSF and Paranal Observatory ESO, Atacama Desert, Chile
Through environmental sensors mapped in real-time into different sounds, LA PARACANTORA creates sonic poems that reveal the performativity of non-human agents of that specific space and time
This sonic rite starts from the idea that there is no such thing as empty space. In places where the natural and technological collide, there are particular disturbances and radiations that are transduced by La PARACANTORA, a sonic artifact that acts as a medium between worlds.
La PARACANTORA becomes a (technological) parasite of the place. It is a transductive device that contains environmental sensors that are mapped in real-time into sounds (synthesizers, samples, textures, words, and other voices) to create a sonic imprint of that specific moment in space and time. This way, it offers a listening rite of the silenced voices that our (limited) perceptual apparatus forgot to listen to. La PARACANTORA acts like a sonic note/sound-taking device and provides a way of approaching our performative reality from other sensitivities to access these places where the Earth becomes a sensor and nature and culture crash and collide.
Connect with your quark-gluon-plasma origins. Shake your material existence, and let this parasitic medium guide you through an exercise of listening to emerge together, stimulate perception, confuse reality, and resonate with the idea that we are as much part of nature as we are part of culture.
LA PARACANTORA has six independent speakers that diffuse sound on-site, a recording system to document the performance of each place and works during the performance/recording session with a battery, allowing it to be an autonomous travelling sculpture that can visit extreme places.
Sensors in the sculpture include barometric pressure, altitude, temperature, accelerometer, electromagnetic fields, anemometer, wind turbine, light, proximity, and vibrations.
