Cecilia Arditto Delsoglio - The speaking house
(2019)
Pieces-installations for flute, electronics and slide projectors
Konvent Zero residence, Berga, Barcelona – July 2019.
Concept and composition: Cecilia Arditto
Flute and objects: Adriana Montorfano
Guest photographer: Daniel Nicolas.
The philosopher Gaston Bachelard defines the concept of house like an intimate space, which has little to do with geometry or architecture. Instead of the room embracing the person who dwells inside, in The speaking house is the music who embraces the house from the inside out.
A collection of over 40 identical slide projectors from 40s are connected via an interface to a computer that controls them. The name of this new artifact is 1000 eyes. The warmness of the vintage original valve-lamps is powered by the precise digital manipulation. The analogue-digital combination makes possible to create precise features, like extremely slow intensity-fades or incredible fast patterns with analog lamps.
The slide projectors spread the images all over the space, converting walls, stairs, ceiling and columns in 3d screens, powering the architecture of the space. The slide projectors project lines and dots in black and white like a prolongation of the music score. These lines gain the walls and space around creating a 3D music score. The slide-projectors are also part of the composition. It is beautiful to see this “flock of machines” in action, turning on and off, fading, opening and closing their eyes.
Flute an electronics dialog with the minimal patterns projected by the projectors. The rhythm of the lamps, as well as its stillness, brigs a musical condition to the room. The flutist with her minimal movements adds a choreographic aspect to the scene. The players become both a character in the composition and a moving screen interacting with the space and the lamps.
1000 eyes artifact: old projectors + digital controller
Identical slide projectors are spread in the space and by pointing at different spots in the room, they allow to discover unusual corners of the building, under original and crazy perspectives. By turning the lights on and off and by using expressive intensity-fades the whole surrounding space acquires a performative feature by changing its composition constantly.
Pierre Schaeffer, the creator of concrete music, talks about music as an “architecture that sings” in The speaking house this metaphor becomes real.
As a bonus, the slide-projectors themselves are not only a medium but part of the composition as well. It is beautiful to see them in action, turning on and off, fading, opening and closing their thousand eyes.
The slide projectors project mostly lines and dots in black and white. These graphics are the prolongation of my music scores that acquire a new and active life when reaching the walls. Lines and points in black and white multiply their expressive possibilities when reaching the three-dimensional space, where the projection of simple lines on an angle in the wall can submerge the viewer into paradoxical views.
But it is not only the composition of the space that The speaking house attends carefully, but also its movement. By changing the lights, the space fluctuates, enlarge, vanishes, dances. The room is music made of bricks and stones.