sound on canvas
- 2018
- mixed media on canvas
- single-board microcontroller, 15 piezoelectric speakers, wires, custom software, custom electronics, cable
- 13 x 18 cm
- buy at paratissima art gallery
The title seems to make fun of both the traditional painting technique and the canvas itself as one of the most privileged medium within the artistic representation. But it literally takes sound onto a canvas by bringing many loudspeakers on it while hiding its heart behind them.Using a canvas with the purpose of exploiting its strong referenced and well known appearance represents a symbolic attempt to bring sound art to the attention of the widest audience possible, and not only to the enthusiasts of new media, by shaping this installation as it was a domestic artwork: sound ready to be hung on the wall.Considering the appearance only, the work looks like a small canvas representing an array of black dots, each of them with a bright golden center. When you switch it on (just plugging the cable in the wall socket) the work comes to life by gently reproducing acoustic noisy pops spaced in time by partially defined periods of silence. This creates a distorted similarity between the two layers of the work, the tidy-looking appearance and the related amplified distribution of dots made by the sonic layer. Buzzers are programmed to only play one after the other, so noisy or loud behaviors are avoided. Sound events are programmed to be different every time by means of constrained random functions applied to the peaks and delay values. This means sounds get every time different yet similar sonic characteristics.