Thursday, December 10, 2009

Baby it's c-c-c-cold outside

Katie Paterson is a Scottish artist whose works claim a very unusual middle ground between sight and sound. Past works have included launching snow from a thousand catapults and recording the sound as it landed; creating invisible fireworks that explode with black sparks; and beaming radio transmissions of music to the moon in order to record the results as they bounced back to her earthly receiver. In her latest piece, Paterson recorded the sound of 3 melting glaciers on Iceland (Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull and Solheimajökull). She then pressed the recordings onto ice records made of melt water from those glaciers. The records were played on 3 turntables until they were completely melted, which took around 2 hours. You can listen to one here.

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