Celebrating the Olympics with sound art. Athens Olympics Inspire Artist’s Computer-Based Sculptures is a fawning and rather silly article from the Associated Press about a Greek sculptress who has created, in celebration of the Olympics, art based on digitally visualized sounds. (See SonArt Olympics for the web site on the travelling exhibit.) Whatever your opinion of the art, there is a strange confusion to the layers of representation – sculpture that draws on graphical representations of digitized (sampled and quantized) words connected to Greek and Olympic themes!!!!
Here is a quote from an art historian who should have known better,
“Observing her work, one could legitimately ask, `What is it that Korovessi does that a machine cannot do?'” said Giannis Kolokotronis, professor of art history at the Thracian Polytechnic Institute of Alexandroupolis in northeastern Greece.
“By reaching deep into the foundations of language, the artist realized that digital analysis of the sound of words may explain how names were attached to objects,” he said.
She sometimes uses the same word in different languages. The sculpture inspired by the graph of the English word “peace” differs from the one based on the Spanish “paz” and another based on the Greek equivalent, “irini.”
It’s not that I dislike the art, some of it might even stand on its own, but there is a unexamined fascination with digital technology – actually a confusion as to the depth or reality of a representation of a digitization. The scupltress has not “reached deep into the foundations of language” – the way digitized sound is represented visually has its history in the technology and it doesn’t have much to do with the foundations of language. The visualization of samples of sound waves has nothing to do with “how names are attached to objects”.
This is sono-visualization gone bizarre.