Katie Paterson Modern Art Oxford
April 1st, 2008, 6:22 am Hobbies Ideas
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here to watch a video report about the Science Museum’s Listening Post
You walk into a white room in a fashionable Oxford art gallery. A fractured,
fragmented version of the Moonlight Sonata echoes from an unmanned grand
piano at one end. On the opposite wall is a white-on-white neon display of a
telephone number. You dial, then listen. Down the line, you hear a
whooshing, splooshing sound. You are connected, live and in real time, to a
glacier melting in Iceland.
Meanwhile, at the Science Museum, in west London, displayed on a huge
futuristic grid, you can see and hear thousands of messages sent by
strangers in internet chat rooms all over the world as they are intercepted,
live, in a work aptly entitled Listening Post. And soon, in a warehouse in
central London, you will find five grand pianos, insides out, playing on
their own over the disembodied voices of William S Burroughs, Claude
Lvi-Strauss and Malcolm X. This is the splendidly titled Stifter%26rsquo;s Dinge,
created by a German composer called Heiner Goebbels. It, too, is a work of
sound art.
Remember when art appreciation used to be a simple, straightforward affair?
You walked into a gallery, looked at some pictures, or maybe a few
sculptures, and that was that. Then came photography, followed by film, the
emergence of performance art and all that conceptual stuff with unmade beds,
pickled sharks and rooms full of oil. Now, thanks to 21st-century
technology, sound art %26ndash; art for the ears, as well as the eyes %26ndash; is bringing
a new dimension to the art world. And it has moved way beyond its origins in
avant-garde music, bringing an innovative approach to traditional subjects
such as nature, landscape and human relationships.
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