2006OP_ERA: Sonic Interface

OP_ERA: SONIC INTERFACE is a 3D sound sculpture made of hundreds of clear PVC tubes hung in space. At Motomix, in the Museu da Imagem e do Som in São Paulo, 600 tubes formed a cylinder six meters across and ten meters high. At Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires the following year, 900 tubes formed a square matrix four meters wide and five meters tall. The sculpture takes the form the building gives it.
One hundred and sixty of the tubes contain three-inch loudspeakers, coupled to the PVC through transparent acrylic cones. Sixteen microphones, positioned outside the gallery, feed the loudspeakers. The microphones are distributed across the four cardinal points — north, south, east, west — and at three heights: one meter, one and a half meters, two meters from the floor. The loudspeakers inside the sculpture follow the same logic.

The result is a sound map of the building's surroundings, played back inside its body. From the loudspeakers at one meter, visitors hear the street to the west. At one and a half meters, conversations to the east, kitchen sounds to the north. At two meters, birds to the east, airplanes to the north. The sculpture is a kind of acoustic control room — except that nothing watches. Sound, unlike image, refuses identification. The visitor hears the city; the city does not see the visitor.

Where the other installations in OP_ERA build environments around abstract concepts of space — hypercubes, attractors, fifth dimensions — SONIC INTERFACE treats the exhibition site itself as the space to be investigated. The geometry under examination is the building's own. The sculpture is its sectional drawing, in sound.