Cathy van Eck: Hearing Sirens

Title:

Hearing Sirens

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Performers:



• Cathy van Eck

Symposium:

• ISEA2009: 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art
• More artworks from ISEA2009:  

Venue(s):

• Waterfront Hall , Belfast , Ireland

Medium:

A performance for mp3 players and portable hornloudspeakers.

Artist Statement:

A usual fashion to hear music nowadays is through headphones. The mp3- player made music more transportable than ever before, and public spaces are crowded nowadays with people, living in their own acoustic world. This project is about reversing this situation. I am walking around the city, playing music from an mp3-player, this time not for creating private music, but for diffusing it out of two big yellow hornloudspeakers, radiating the sound to the environment. The siren is both a mythological woman, having the body of a bird and the head of a woman as a noisemaker, used to warn in emergency cases. The sirens as bird women were known in Antiquity for their beautiful singing. It was unable to resist them and most of the men who heard them did not survive. The emergency siren is a noisemaker and can be seen as a survival tool. I used both as an acoustic, visual and conceptual starting-point for the project Hearing Sirens.

Category:

• Sound Art
• Performances