Climate Parliament
“Climate Parliament” is an interactive sound and light installation featuring thousands of audio channels playing on small, custom-made loudspeakers, suspended under the ceiling of a semi-outdoor passageway at Rice University. The speakers are hung out of reach of passers-by in a regular, but staggered formation that creates semi-circular archways with a six-foot radius.
Commissioned by the Moody Center for the Arts, the piece contains thousands of field recordings that highlight the rich, diverse, urgent, yet often unreported history of civic, academic, political, scientific, and philosophical resistance to human-made environmental collapse. Each speaker plays a different recording of protests, academic presentations, civil disobedience, discussions, and other sources from archives spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—from interviews with Rice professor Timothy Morton to speeches by the young activist Greta Thunberg, to the collective cries of student-led protests. The piece responds to the movement of passers-by whose presence automatically triggers waves of sound and light that dissipate along the sonic arcade. The project results in a complex polyphony that emerges from the array of field recordings, creating an environment of critical reflection for the participant. Each speaker is equipped with a small ring of white LED light that visualizes the waves of playback from the speakers. When no one is detected, the speakers are silent and dim, while if several people are in the passageway, the speakers are triggered and brightened, forming complex patterns generated by their movements.
The installation is part of a series investigating the perception of thousands of simultaneous sounds, each playing on a different dedicated loudspeaker, referencing what Lozano-Hemmer calls “speaker as pixel.” A pixel is a point of light varying in intensity and spectral frequency; coordinated with its neighbours, the perception of pixels produces images. The question is, if we have hundreds or thousands of sound sources in an array, can we experience the emergence of a new perceptible complexity beyond the expected cacophony? (Short answer: yes.)
Commissioned by the Moody Center for the Arts, the piece contains thousands of field recordings that highlight the rich, diverse, urgent, yet often unreported history of civic, academic, political, scientific, and philosophical resistance to human-made environmental collapse. Each speaker plays a different recording of protests, academic presentations, civil disobedience, discussions, and other sources from archives spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—from interviews with Rice professor Timothy Morton to speeches by the young activist Greta Thunberg, to the collective cries of student-led protests. The piece responds to the movement of passers-by whose presence automatically triggers waves of sound and light that dissipate along the sonic arcade. The project results in a complex polyphony that emerges from the array of field recordings, creating an environment of critical reflection for the participant. Each speaker is equipped with a small ring of white LED light that visualizes the waves of playback from the speakers. When no one is detected, the speakers are silent and dim, while if several people are in the passageway, the speakers are triggered and brightened, forming complex patterns generated by their movements.
The installation is part of a series investigating the perception of thousands of simultaneous sounds, each playing on a different dedicated loudspeaker, referencing what Lozano-Hemmer calls “speaker as pixel.” A pixel is a point of light varying in intensity and spectral frequency; coordinated with its neighbours, the perception of pixels produces images. The question is, if we have hundreds or thousands of sound sources in an array, can we experience the emergence of a new perceptible complexity beyond the expected cacophony? (Short answer: yes.)
General info
Year of creation:
2024
Technique:
481 Custom-made speakers and electronics, LED lights, computer, micro-SD cards
Dimensions:
Variable
Edition:
1 Edition
Collectors:
private collector
Exhibitions
- Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Climate Parliament, Rice University Moody Center For The Arts, Houston, Texas, United States, 2024.
Credits
- Programming: Timothy Belliveau, Paul Guillemette. Stephan Schulz
- Production Assistance: Steven Hoffart, Benoit Soucy, Emily Green, Guillaume Tremblay, Hugo Daoust, Najeeba Ahmed, Michael Nardone, Agnès Dakroub, Jade Seguela
Photo Library (click to expand)
