The unfinished space

This sound installation consists of 2 walls constructed as half a cubical room (or a corner). There are 20 speakers in the installation, 10 on each wall. To every speaker a sensor is connected, which measures the distance to whatever is within the room (a person, an animal, a wheelchair etc), and then translates the distance to sound programmed in a computer. Two of the speakers are connected to a webcam which measures the color levels in the image captured by the camera, and translates them to sound aswell. The effect becomes somewhat like a three-dimensional theremin. No matter how you move yourself within the walls, a specific sound will be generated, depending on where in the room you are, how fat/thin you are, your length, the colors of your clothes etc.

The installation was shown on the spring exhibition of The royal college of fine arts in Stockholm. On the opening day Lotta Melin made three dance improvisation performances (once every hour), which can be seen and downloaded here below on this page. The reason why I invited her to dance there was (apart from that I think she is an extremely good dancer and a very nice person) to see how the space could be used by a person who has absolute body control and can take advantage of the room to it´s maximum, and use it more as a tool/instrument to produce something unique.

During the exhibition I improved the program which generated the sounds so the transitions between tones/noises became much smoother and more natural. The last day I programmed it so it only generated sine wave tones in different pitch ranges, then I invited my father, Anders Caringer, to perform with me in the room. Our first idea was to create more "musical" material than Lotta had created before, with harmonies and specific tones. It was harder than we thought, and we realized that we had to practise quite a while to make that work, but it became a very interesting experiment. My father went out and invited people from the audience in the middle of the performance to come and play with us, and with four persons playing together in the same time it was even harder to produce any kind of harmonic content. It didn´t matter though, as the experiment was the goal. Photos from that performance can also be seen here below.