Potentiale   2010

Potentials

A version of the bells of the Marktkirche in Hanover that it is based on, and twelve variations:

The bells
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve

Sixteen sound steles on a square in the inner city, with a distance of more than ten meters between them, at 4 x 4 Cartesian coordinates. Commission for an installation that can fill one hour as part of an umbrella concept that distributes sixteen installations over the course of a day.

A look on the city, a "listen" to the city, on the contradictory commotion, juxtapositions, cooperations, conflicts of people, so many in so little space. They meet, in passing, on the street, or on this square. The beggar and the banker. The busker and the backpacker. The addict and the soldier. Held together by functions, alotments, the flow of buying and selling.

A fixed system, but what potential. What would be possible if. What on the square, on the square the bells of the Marktkirche sound every quarter of an hout. Two mark the quarters of the hour, one the full hour. What if this bell did not always sound the same --- the bell that has so many facets, so many modes of being. So many potentials.

The construction of the installation is simple. First one strike, then two, then three, until twelve strikes. The hours of half a day, but all in a single hour, about five minutes apart. By chance meeting the sound of the "real" bell, which is never the same, set off against the steady variations of this sound in the installation. What used to be a resonance comes back and becomes a new sound. Partials expand and contract. Situations from the course of a single strike become independent sounds; a path, starting somewhere and ending at nearly the same place. Nearly.

Another potential in the spatialisation of the sounds by the sixteen independently controllable steles on the square. Sometimes the strokes turn like the hands of a clock, sometimes the reverbarations withdraw to the outside only to come back with renewed force to the centre. Sometimes the square splits into two halves. Variations also on the space, programmed in a way that no version will be the same as another. Variations of potentials, of a sound, a space, a city.