by Hannes Köcher and Thomas Grill, 2020
commissioned by rotting sounds
Sound archive, wooden seat rows, laser engraving machine
The archive of the auditorium of rotting sounds is continuously growing. Every hour, each of the sounding exhibits in the space leaves one minute of audio data in the archive, already amounting to tens of thousands of sound items.
This installation inscribes these sounds into the exhibition space itself, laser engraving time-frequency representations into the wooden seat rows. Each of the about 1000 seatback planks can carry 10 seconds of sound which – in principle – can be reconstructed at a later time.
The machine works autonomously, taking a few hours per plank. By the end of the year 2021, all the seat rows will be filled with a representative random selection of archived sound items.
