Cacophony

“Cacophony” – A 16 channel acousmatic, experimental, soundscape installation, with live randomly generating code, live feeds, acoustic illusions. In a 3000 sq ft, blacked out space, over 150 voices created a spatial play of sound illusions through a range of languages, dialects, accents, pitch and timbre suggesting at and questioning fixed notions of political and cultural identities. This immersive, transmogrifying installation led the listener on a unique intimate journey through the space, sometimes with poetic, gentle whispers, barely heard and misheard, literally near their ears, and at times creating a cacophony of competing voices wrapped in acoustic hallucinations ‘pleading to be heard’. The piece was created as a site specific installation, with improvisations, performances, workshops and acoustic experiments over a period of a year in collaboration with black communities.

Installation concept and recordings by Poulomi Desai and exhibited at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre in February 1999 – 2000 and is an early example of an artist working with sound, random code and voices for a large-scale installation. This exhibition and subsequent web project interpretation was commissioned by The Mead Gallery and Moti Roti, and was part of the exhibition “Fresh Masala”.

Cacophony Web Project

This movie is an example of the Cacophony web project.

Users were invited to submit one or two words to describe themselves, the words were then added to a database the text was then outputted, highlighted, animated and merged with other submissions to create a visual Cacophony of words.

The audio is from the original Mead Gallery installation by Poulomi Desai and repurposed for the online project.

Web project created by Simon Underwood.

Unfortunately we are unable to host the original project as it was programmed using Adobe Flash and Adobe no longer supports this format. We hope this movie gives you some semblance of the original and its functionality.