Fossil Records
From May 6, 2015 to June 6, 2015
Opening on Wednesday May 6, 2015
Robin Meier is a trained musician who for several years has been conducting some ethological research based on intelligence and its capacity to interact with the environment. For example he creates devices allowing him to establish communication with the animal kingdom through sound signals, but also to simulate or alter its behaviour.Opening on Wednesday May 6, 2015
Although traditionally the world of signs and artifice does distinguish man from animals, Robin Meier revisits this evolution criterion in order to explore and examine it. Through his setting up of devices, animals become this “other” with whom he establishes an exchange via the study of its behaviours and language.
In this respect the fact that Robin Meier used the Golden Record’s sound bank within the framework of some of his research is highly significant. This record taken by NASA on board the Voyager space probes contains sounds recorded on Earth and chosen for their “universal” characteristics. Aimed at possible forms of extra-terrestrial consciousness, it is above all an invitation to question our anthropocentric vision of the world by broadening the spectrum of our relationship to the Other and the unknown.
The “paleo-acoustic” research that he creates for the Studio borrows from it the utopian characteristic based on a possible encounter that defies space and time. Robin Meier musically analyses and interprets the stridulation of a prehistorical insect from the visible veins of a fossil.
“The first possibility for Voyager to pass by a potentially inhabited planet wouldn’t be until several million years from now – a time after which a substantial part of the sounds contained in the record will have disappeared from Earth, like the sounds of the insects that I have ben recreating. It is somehow a situation where aliens would find Voyager! Besides, the method of sound production of these insects is called stridulation and in principle really resembles what a record player would sound like when its grooves start making the needle vibrate. I like this double parallel and I want to implement it for the physical incarnation of this project”.
MP
Thanks:
- Stefano Delle Monache, sonic interaction designer, assistant professor at the Department of Architecture and Arts, Iuav University of Venice, Italy
the skatvg.eu project consortium for the Sound Design Toolkit
- Fernando Montealegre Zapata, Lecturer and assistant professor at the Bioacoustics and Sensory Biology lab, Lincoln UK
Picture credit:
- Olivier Béthoux, Musée National de l'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France
- Edmund Jarzembowski, Postgraduate Research Institute for Sedimentology, University of Reading