Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art Video Installation Men Making Sound Effects
Inside a pitch-nighttime room at the Los Angeles Canton Museum of Art hang 42 cell phones, making a room-sized mobile that looks like the sort of dystopic technological device you might find in an episode of "Black Mirror." Each handset bears a simple command in white letters on a black screen: "Talk to Me Sing to Me."
I say, "How-do-you-do."
For the tape:
12:22 p.m. Aug. 30, 2019 An before version of this story reported that Snapchat users publish 3.5 billion videos daily. They publish 3.5 billion Snaps daily — which includes nevertheless photographs.
The phone screens light up with a brief burst of video, each with different images. The cacophony somehow echoes the tones in my vocalization. Then, just equally rapidly as everything appeared, the screens go black.
I say "hullo" a second fourth dimension and the room is once again illuminated with crude jail cell phone shots that reveal people of all genders, ethnicities and races sprawled on couches, chilling in beds and sitting effectually kitchens, chattering into the camera. I tin can't hear what they say, but their commonage inflections mimic my own. Again, in an instant, they are gone.
The piece, titled "Talk to Me / Sing to Me," is function of "Sound Stories," a new exhibition past composer and multimedia creative person Christian Marclay, who uses public videos uploaded to the social media platform Snapchat as his primary material in the installations. A team of engineers from Snap Inc., Snapchat'due south parent visitor, led by the company's director of applied science, Andrew Lin, collaborated with Marclay on the project by developing algorithms that could help filter and organize videos based on their sonic qualities.
An installation view of Christian Marclay's "Talk to Me/Sing to Me," in which visitors are invited to speak or sing into smartphones suspended from the ceiling.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
"It was more the audio that I was looking for rather than action," says Marclay as he steps gingerly through darkened galleries in the midst of installation. "It was listening rather than looking."
And the listening turned upward some interesting sounds.
"The potato fries — the crunchy murphy chips," he says. "The sound of broken iPhone glass, that is interesting. Scratching ice. I idea, 'Wow, I could make a symphony out of these.'"
Marclay, 64, was built-in in California, raised in Switzerland and is now based principally in London. Throughout his career, he has created works that take elements of cultural ephemera — bits of video, fragments of sound, old cassette tapes — and rearranges them into something bigger than the sum of their parts.
This summer, his video "48 State of war Movies," installed in the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale (ongoing through Nov. 24), drew the attention of critics for the ways in which it visually and audibly nested several dozen state of war films into a single, explosive work. (It will proceed view at New York'southward Paula Cooper Gallery adjacent month.) At the Biennale's Giardini exhibition space, Marclay's woodblock impress series "Scream," an homage to Edvard Munch, is on display.
(Christian Marclay / Paula Cooper Gallery)
But Marclay is perchance all-time known for his 2010 work, "The Clock," a looped, 24-hour montage of motion-picture show and television clips that dwells on clocks and the passage of time and is screened in such a way so that the time in the film always parallels existent time. (When it is noon in the film, it is noon in the theater.)
The piece was a blast from the moment it showtime landed at Paula Cooper Gallery in February 2011, generating lines around the block. Soon thereafter it was acquired past LACMA, which likewise held screenings of the work — 1 of which drew the attention of an arts organization across the street, which served free doughnuts to Marclay fans for an entire 24-60 minutes screening cycle.
Despite this brush with viral fame, Marclay is hardly a natural for whatsoever project involving social media.
"I don't do anything," he says, looking perplexed at the idea of continuous connexion. "I do e-mail. That's it."
In fact, when he was first approached past Snap Inc. for a possible commission, his first instinct was to plough the offer downwards. Says Marclay: "Everyone said, 'Don't go that route.'"
But he grew curious when the company told him that users create 3.5 billion Snaps daily.
"That," says Marclay, "was staggering."
"What's surprising is the similarity and the banality," he says. "And the fact that people around the globe practice the same things with their telephone. ... Information technology's a new form of language — a very visual language."
But more often than not, the 5 installations in "Sound Stories" are more about audio than they are almost visuals.
"In these little snippets of what happens in the earth y'all tin find music."
— Andrew Lin, Snap, Inc.
"Tinsel Loop," from 2018, employs sonic elements from Snapchat videos to play a lullaby-ish xviii-note Marclay limerick, "Tinsel," which was designed to be played on a music box. Accompanying the sound is the video, facing off on a pair of screens, just it is incidental to the tune that is generated — one drawn from the sounds of telephone pings and automotive bleeps and cats meowing. Every time the tune repeats, it draws from a new collection of Snapchat fragments, so that each version of "Tinsel" sounds like a variation of a theme.
His employ of incidental sound is at its most dramatic in a room-sized installation called "The Organ," from 2018. The slice is interactive, consisting of an organ that sits at the center of a darkened room. Hit a key and the organ plays that notation past playing a column of videos that appears on an overhead screen. Hitting multiple keys and multiple columns appear. Rest your arm on the keyboard and everything lights up. (I used the organ to play the only ditty I know: "La Polka de Los Perros." A combination of incidental noise bleeted out a recognizable version of the melody.)
"There is a lightness" to Snapchat, says Marclay. "That playfulness, I call up, was kind of of import to me."
Christian Marclay stands beneath his work "Sound Tracks," which features Snapchat videos slowed down to return their sounds unrecognizable.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times )
All of this required stripping sound from hundreds of millions of videos, analyzing the sounds, assigning a pitch to them, and so whittling the pile to a manageable "few hundred thousand" — the sort of work that would take taken Marclay several lifetimes to complete. And that's where Snapchat'south engineering science team came in.
"We built a suite of computers that could do the audio analysis on these tracks," says Lin. "It basically can take a signal and suspension it up into all of its component frequencies."
These were then reviewed individually by engineers to confirm the pitch and make sure that video didn't violate Snapchat's community guidelines. For some installations, Marclay and so made further refinements.
In "All Together," he collaged like images (feet walking) and sounds (the crackle of food frying gives mode to the patter of pelting). In "Talk to Me / Sing to Me," he selected simply videos with faces.
"It's that small, intimate relationship," he says of the way people collaborate with their phones — and the presumptive audiences that reside at the other end. And he wanted visitors to the gallery to face up the individuals who produced the sounds. "It forces a collective behavior. If you accept many people in a room, you have to heed."
In the installation, Marclay isn't just interested in presenting sound. He is interested in exploring the unique languages and social conditions that are emerging as a result of social media.
Curator Rita Gonzalez, who helped organize the LACMA version of the exhibition (the installations were previously shown last twelvemonth at the Cannes Lion International Festival of Creativity), says the work non simply captures the whimsy of digital missives, but the plaintiveness, too.
"The more time I spend in it, the more I felt like in that location was a loneliness to it," says Gonzalez of "Talk To Me / Sing To Me." "People are speaking into a phone hoping to detect a connection and hoping someone will listen to them."
"It's very performative — especially with all the filters," says Marclay, of the ways in which people broadcast themselves. "Certain things go viral because those things are quite unusual but the rest is bland and non that interesting, but it says something about you. It is a mask."
Lin says that working with Marclay has made him think about the ways in which language and sound tin be sculpted.
"Similar when people say 'ah' or 'um,' those make interesting notes," he says. "You tin can string that together and make something really interesting. In these little snippets of what happens in the world you tin notice music."
Christian Marclay at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
For Marclay, it'due south most showcasing sound that is heard simply perhaps goes unnoticed.
"I wanted to focus on the sound element which people don't think near," he says. "Similar you film something and you record the conversation side by side to you and you lot don't pay attention to it. I wanted people to realize that they had a microphone in their easily."
And yet none of this has convinced Marclay to download Snapchat on his ain telephone.
"Though," he says, "they tried very hard to get me on."
Christian Marclay: "Sound Stories"
Source: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2019-08-29/how-christian-marclay-is-turning-snapchat-messages-into-sound-art
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