Untitled Installation - Apply Within: Experience Essential

July 13 - 15, 2009
Ard Bia / Nimmos (Galway, Ireland)

This intervention / sound installation took place as part of the exhibition Apply Within: Experience Essential curated by Jennie Guy.

The interior sounds of a restaurant are traces of a series of functions executed within a clearly defined architectural and social space. Using carefully placed microphones and an array of PA speakers, these traces are shifted from the interior of the restaurant to its exterior, amplifying and projecting a mixture of private conversations, the clatter of food being prepared, and the intimate sounds of eating itself outwards into the public space adjacent to the restaurant. This mediation partially displaces the restaurant within the context of its location, blurring its boundaries and forcing it to perform more actively within its surrounding environment.

For this installation I placed four AKG C414 XLS microphones on microphone stands in prominent locations in a small restaurant / art space (Ard Bia / Nimmo's). Two of the microphones were oriented directly over tables, while the other two were located near the bar / cafe and the kitchen. These served as visual cues to the presence of the artwork, hinting at a process of sonic displacement but not revealing the intervention explicitly. The choice of microphones was based on their visual appearance as much as on their sonic performance; the intent was that these props would trigger associations of a professional recording studio.

The sounds picked up via the microphones were routed through a mixer and played back at a moderate volume level outside of the restaurant via two large PA speakers. The sounds of the restaurant mixed with the sound environment of the exterior public square, occasionally becoming dominant (with the hiss of the coffee machine, a loud burst of laughter, or a glass dropped on the floor) and gradually fading to a more subdued murmur of voices late in the evenings.

This installation triggered a variety of responses from people. Some were uncomfortable as they discovered what was happening only after dining and exiting the building, realizing that their private conversation had been somehow amplified and distributed in public. Others (both diners and passersby) encountered it as a more playful intervention, making jokes about hearing what the cooks were saying in the kitchen as they prepared food, or making sure they didn't talk about their friends too loudly while they were eating.

This intervention could be implemented on a much larger scale in the future, incorporating a large array of microphones in a larger restaurant, and multiple loudspeakers distriubuted to create a more complex spatialization of the restaurant's soundscape in an adjacent public space.

I also performed a short improvisation with Russell Hart / economicthoughtprojects during this exhibtion, using sounds captured by the installation during the preceding day. For more information please visit the Performance section.