Great Animal Orchestra
London/Shanghai/Seoul/Paris/Boston/Sydney/Lille 2016 -2022
Fondation Cartier pour L'art contemporain invited United Visual Artists to collaborate on The Great Animal Orchestra, the 2016 exhibition that celebrates the work of musician, bio-acoustician and scientist Bernie Krause.
Krause has been recording animals for 45 years and has amassed a collection of more than 5,000 hours of sounds recordings of over 15,000 individual species in their natural habitats from all over the world. 70% of the animals he recorded have now been rendered silent due to human activity.
The Great Animal Orchestra is a performative space in which spectrograms specifically crafted for and generated by Bernie Krause’s soundscapes form an abstract projected landscape, a visual interpretation of the various global locations and times of day that Krause made the original recordings. On the floor, in front of the projections a shallow pool of black-coloured water seamlessly reflects the data and brings another dimension to the work. Speakers generate ripples to visualise the sound frequencies inaudible to the human ear.
The installation envelops the audience encouraging them to linger and reflect on the language of the living sounds and the phenomenon that each animal has its own acoustic signature in the oral tapestry of its ecosystem.
The Great Animal Orchestra is part now part of the Fondation Cartier’s collection and has toured to Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, The Power Station of Art, Shanghai and 180 The Strand, London.
