Specialising and Exhibiting

Week4-Sound for Spatialisation

I was very glad to visit Senate House Library for the exhibition ” A Thousand Words for Weather” cause I had never been there and I had never had an experience of listening to the multichannel piece in public. Maybe I had an experience listening sound art pieces at Tate Britain? But the artist focused more on visual stuff so I had nearly forgotten about it. Was that related to sound any more? it was a hard question.

The Senate house library is part of the University of London, and the visitors have been experiencing the sound of the weather as it responds to live data from the Met Office. The idea itself is inspiring more than the reality. I won’t think there would be any relationship between poetries and weather. But yeah, as I know about British people. they all love to have small talks about the weather. which I just did not get it. The place of assembling the piece is also interesting because of the juxtaposition on the quietness of people and the talking in the headphones.

The art piece is a collaboration with writer Jessica J Lee and sound artist Claudia Molitor, offering a new multilingual ‘dictionary’ of words with their definitions to explore the role of translation and generate a shared language to describe our changing experience of climate and the environment. Software architect Peter Chilvers positioned itself as a digital ‘weather station’ the new World Weather Network has invited artists and writers to report on environmental changes experienced locally that go on to form a complex and constantly fluctuating global climate system. I quite like the way they demonstrate “Chinese”, it was really into Taoism and was not too boring.

I think one thing I would suggest for it is the volume, as I don’t have really good hearing, I think the micro sounds on the fifth floor which were displayed in the balcony were kind of too soft. And I wouldn’t think the sound was matching to today’s weather which I found was not so fantastic.