Recollector
If space has memory, it is embodied in the people that populate it. When they leave, only traces remain. One can only guess what may have happened minutes, months or lifetimes ago.
Recollector has its own memory; it remembers and recalls those that once passed through. Stored recollections impose themselves at unexpected moments – occasionally recognisable, oftentimes distorted or faint. They grow, fade and convolute, taking on a life of their own.
The installation acts as a platform in which visitors can communicate with each other by leaving traces, becoming one of the room’s countless recollections of a past version of itself that might have never existed.
A curved metal sheet covers the whole wall of one the side of a room; on the opposite wall, light is sent through a slit in a box that rotates around a 120° angle, creating a vertical strip of light that wanders slowly across the sculpture.
The metal panel at the same time acts as a speaker membrane through which sounds are played, turning the sculpture into a large loudspeaker.
We curated a set of precomposed audio segments, the playback order of which is determined by a generative matching algorithm. The result is a consistent but continuously varying stream of audio constituting the sonic ambience of the installation.
In a second step, we insert traces of those who entered the room into the stream – in quiet periods, visitors’ words and utterances are recorded, and upon recording enter the stream as glitches and spectral traces that emerge and subside, sedimenting the material in various forms.