Work text
The performance aimed to unveil the acoustic qualities of the landscape through a collective experience and immersion in a musical dialogue with the plants and the space.
On 3 April 2009, a spatially distributed acoustic event was conducted in a forested area near Minsk.
Participants invited through social media were instructed to arrive at a designated railway platform with any musical instrument and proceed into the forest, using sound as their means of orientation. The location of the event was not specified. There was no common musical task.
The initial signal sources were positioned at a distance from one another and concealed from arriving participants. The hilly terrain, intersected by ravines, distorted sound propagation: the actual distance to a source differed from the perceived distance.
The number of acoustically active participants increased. Signal receivers began producing sound themselves and became new sources; each new arrival entered an environment already altered by previous participants. The distinction between sound production and perception became increasingly indeterminate.
The environment had no center. Sources were unstable, signal intensity varied, and perception depended on the listener's position. The landscape simultaneously transmitted and distorted signals. Participants' movements were determined by a chain of local reactions: a signal could redirect movement, elicit a sonic response, or bring an action to a halt.
При этом никто толком не понимал, что происходит. Нельзя было определить, где музыканты, где публика, кто начал играть первым и куда вообще следует идти. Люди двигались на звук, но звук постоянно перемещался вместе с ними. Иногда казалось, что все начинают сходиться в одном месте, но затем откуда-нибудь издалека доносился новый сигнал, и направление движения менялось.
Возникло то, что я бы назвал звуковым заражением.
The system did not require continuous control. As the number of participants increased, the organizing structure established by the initiators was partially replaced by self-organization.
No participant possessed information about the state of the system as a whole. At any given moment, each had access only to a portion of the event, limited by location and audibility. The event existed as an aggregate of divergent perceptions that did not constitute a unified point of observation.
After the sound ceased, the system no longer existed in its original form. Its continued existence is sustained by documentary recordings, participants' recollections, and subsequent descriptions. These make it possible to reconstruct certain parameters of the event, but not to reproduce its state.
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