Obra Sonora

Rafael Lozano Hemmer//Carroll / Fletcher

Obra Sonora (or ‘Sound Work’ in Spanish) took sound as its primary medium, featuring four acoustic installations by the artist, two of which were shown for the first time. Following the concept of “speakers as pixels”, these installations used multi-channel audio to panoramically represent sound data, ranging from the voice recordings of thousands of gallery visitors, to national anthems past and present, and the complete works of eleven classical composers. Together, the exhibition comprised over 3000 speakers, each playing back a different channel of audio across several massive sound banks. Despite the acoustic density of the installations, each work generated soft, immersive sound layers, inspired by the spatial research of composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgar Varèse and Alvin Lucier.