Works

SHIFT

, 2008
Speakers, amplifier, mixer, cables, circuits, voltage transformers
Site specific dimensions

The effect of pitch shift, from which the name of this work derives, can be easily reproduced by holding an elastic band in your hands and pitching it. The vibration you obtain by doing this can vary depending on the degree of tension of the elastic band: by stretching it and increasing the tension, the ensuing sound will be more acute – by releasing it, the vibration will be reduced and the sound will be deeper.

SHIFT is a system that enables the sonorisation of the tension lows of a power system. The device, fed by a regular electric socket, can convert in real time the current into sounds, revealing the intensity variations of the system it is connected to.

The extremely high frequency that derives from it, similar to the one of a whistle, pierces and cuts through the emptiness of the room, remaining in the memory of whoever encounters it, even after getting away from the sound source, almost as an obscure warning, whispered with insistence in one’s ear.

But what does it whistle? Maybe it is just hissing its own story, a parasite living attached to the body of a wall, ready to grasp any single change, to seize every weakness, any crumbling, any contraction.

By impressing them as a transitional memory, waiting for the attenuation and total switching off.

 

 

SHIFT was the award-winning project of the Seventh Edition of the Premio Furla.