Krista Dragomer

Re-wilding the Syrinx is an eight-channel interactive sound installation by Krista Dragomer with interactive programing by Bob Pritchard, exhibited at “Biopolitical Tactics", Rat Park/Babycastles, NY, 2014, curated by Eben Kirksey.

Birdhouse sculptures with internal speakers arranged in a semi-circle played an aleatoric composition of cell tower emissions and bird sounds. The installation utilized programming which allowed for the sounds from the 8 individual sound sculptures to trigger each other, resulting in a constantly changing soundscape of bird call sounds and cell technology digital interference.

Humans try to imagine, empathize and quantify the way life changes as a result of the way we fill the night sky with light, fill in a wetland with soil and debris, or fill the air with pulsating sound. Logically we must know that anything that sees, that drinks, that navigates sonically must now do it differently, but it becomes abstract when it falls outside our human sensorium, when our own senses have recalibrated darkness and silence, to see and hear it when it isn’t really there.  Re-wilding the Syrinx amplifies the acoustics of frequencies that fall to the background, that buzz in the cells of bodies caught in the thick digital air.

This work was part of series of art interventions, collaborations, and curatorial projects with Eben Kirksey and the Multispecies Salon.

Click the play button to hear a stereo sample of the audio.