Philip Liu

In 1695, an organist visited a mountain after he heard from his servant that instrumental sounds were coming from it. He could indeed hear several voices, as well as sounds of the cornet, trombone, and violin. He shouted to these invisible musicians or musicians of the underground.

 

“If you come from heaven, reveal yourself. But if you are from hell, stop that mysterious music!”

 

This is an anecdote of a person who experienced a phenomenon caused by the wind, recorded in Carl Engel’s 「Aeolian Music」written in 1882.

 

‘Orchestral Airflow Superposition’ is a work in which separate airflow patterns coming from various times and spaces are gathered through digital technology, creating a new aural, visual, and tactile relativity. The apparatuses—a digital version of the ancient instruments that were automatically played by wind—create aural airflow patterns, while the virtual garden on the screen portrays virtual objects swaying in the wind, creating a visual pattern.

 

In the exhibition space, the visitor can experience the entirety of the sensorial patterns arriving from different times and spaces in the form of superposition, which symbolizes the perspective of the digital sensory of the post-human entity—a multi-sensorial, multi-dimensional perspective. The artist first sampled the patterns and the sounds of winds from various locations, such as Seoul and Gwangju, using a wind sampling device that has four vertically arranged sensors.

 

The apparatuses installed in the exhibition space are four wind-generating devices that recreate the wind patterns of the original location, at the same time, creating unique half-acoustic-half-digital sounds with physical modeling synthesis. While one device creates a durational sound similar to a string instrument, another device creates a sound similar to a wind instrument, and yet another one creates patterns similar to percussions. All of these sounds are in the state of superposition and 

 

The virtual garden in the two screens visualizes the way trees sway according to the strength of the wind. On each screen, one can witness how the wind patterns of two locations merge, symbolized by the apparatuses placed at each end of the screen.

 

Consequently, a collection of multilayered and imbricated events will present in the exhibition space, where the wind patterns of three locations overlap in aural and tactile forms and wind patterns of two locations overlap in visual forms in the virtual space.

 

The term “superposition” is somewhat an arbitrary term used in this work which is different from its original, scientific meaning; it refers to the state of the brain receiving and parallelly interpreting various sensorial streams using senses dispersed in different locations, the ability to be gained by the post-human entity when its sensorial organs are expanded through an artificial evolution in the future.

Wouldn’t humans have a completely different aesthetic standard, if parts or the whole of their bodies are digitized in the future? Just as a single note sounds completely different from the harmonical chord including this note, the multidimensional sensory system—although it’s difficult to imagine at this current moment—will offer a different concept of art in the future.

This work invites visitors to imagine and reflect on this concept.