BZZZ! The sound of electricity (2012)

Bzzz ! is a sound installation designed to render the sound of electricity audible and spread it over the ambient space.

The sculpture has a radial form, arranged around a sound wave generator at the centre of a room surrounded by a set of loudspeakers attached to mic stands. The generator is connected to the loudspeakers by a bundle of audio wires running vertically and then branching out to form a sort of tree that shows the pathways of the electrical current.

The frequency generator is of a deliberately crude design, comprising just a few basic electronic components that allow the electrical current to be modulated so as to generate slightly amplified sound vibrations. Six simultaneous sounds are thereby produced and spread over the ambient space. This arrangement invites the viewer to move from one sound to another and experience how these sounds interact, how they scrape and buzz against one another.

By reinventing an obsolete homemade low-tech sound wave generator in this all-digital age, Bzzz ! serves as a commentary on the history of technology and a tribute to unprocessed, unsampled analog sound : in a word, the raw sound of electricity.

Biography

Industrial music in the 1980s (with the band Nox) to an exploration of electronic and digital cultures in our day, Cécile Babiole’s artistic trajectory has evolved laterally, cutting across the realms of music and the visual arts. Far from de rigueur interdisciplinarianism, her works move back and forth between one language and another, bleeding each code into the other in an ongoing reinterpretation of the relationship between technique and visual or sound arts.

Whether staged in the public realm (streets, busses) or in private venues (galleries, concert halls), her latest installations and performances question our prevailing systems of representation – from an original and ironic angle.