ABOUT
Inspired by the story of a discarded electric chord-organ, the piece contends that the vitality of an invention extends beyond the context of its creation or utility. Is it possible that an invention truly comes to life when its original purpose has been made obsolete? Using custom audio programming and a surround sound speaker system, the reed organ’s essence fills up the installation space, enabling the audience to bear witness to those soundscapes previously impenetrable by the narrow scope of our perception. Until such a measure is taken, those dimensions of reality that we do not perceive are literally out of sight and out of mind. By presenting aspects of the reed organ’s sound that are normally separated from the influential sphere of humans, Vital Organ posits that the familiar world is conveyed through sensory faculties conditioned by our expectations, not self-evident truths. Vital Organ seeks to confound these expectations and deliver the participant to a new collection of possible truths concerning the notion of beauty, utility, and what prerequisites an object must meet to be ‘alive’.
The notion of the ‘soundscape’ plays a crucial role in understanding the organ’s existence. A soundscape entails every sonic aspect of an acoustic environment, including undesirable sounds; each incidental noise, nonmusical sound, or air-pressure wave—of any sort—is equally pivotal as they coalesce into a/the world conveyed to us by our ears. Photovoltaic sensors will detect the presence of the audience within the exhibit, allowing the work to function as a living being. In addition to the sonic components derived from the processing of the organ’s vibrating reeds, contact microphones will be placed within other hands-on mechanisms in the exhibit, allowing the artwork to also detect any attempted manipulation of its components. The information from the sensors and microphones is routed to a computer which guides the responses of the multi-media environment. The ambient sounds of its body fill the room to suggest the walls and ceilings as an outer casing, while other interactive features of the exhibit parallel its anatomical processes—thereby placing the audience inside the electric chord-organ. Here is where our empathy exercise stretches the limitations of what it means to walk in another’s shoes—if instruments wore shoes, of course.
The spectator meets a series of loaded sensory experiences—controlled by velocity, pressure waves, and other calculated quantifications of the organ’s sound—as the abilities of the instrument are reinterpreted through other artistic mediums. Although Vital Organ’s stimuli might evoke the devices of a specific sensory organ upon intake, its events are deliberately choreographed to resonate within the context of an entirely different mode of sensory reception; revealing the tension between expectation, perception, and interpretation. The installation promises that the reality beneath shallow judgement might be a world of far more complex intricacy, entailing the strategic manipulation of laws of physics, sensory distrust, and unknowable incomprehensibility. As the chord organ undergoes a messy dissection, with its guts metaphorically spewed across the exhibit, so too are the processes at work inside the human form exposed and made vulnerable to critique.
