Waves Daniel Palacios
Daniel Palacios is an artist who searches the relations of perception, art and industry. He creates machines that can scan and visualise the flow of visitors (Waves, 2006-07), or objects that communicate with their viewers by means of artificial intelligence (Kill the process, 2010). These are works that create snapshots of reality and pose questions about perception, memory, time and space. Here we share one of his installations “Waves”, in which he generates three dimensionally series of waves floating in space based on the physical movement of the visitors around the installation, and by using a long piece of rope.
“A long piece of rope represents three dimensionally a series of waves floating in space, as well as producing sounds from the physical action of their movement: the rope which creates the volume also simultaneously creates the sound by cutting through the air, making up a single element. Depending on how we may act in front of it, according to the number of observers and their movements, it will pass from a steady line without sound to chaotic shapes of irregular sounds (the more movement there is around the installation) through the different phases of sinusoidal waves and harmonic sounds.
These kinds of action-reaction influences applied to sound and space are the basis of this installation. Due to its particular features, a space has a way of relating with sound, understanding sound as a series of compressions and decompressions which move through the air, so that the geometry of the space itself and the elements in it will influence the movements of the sound and finally our perception of the sound; adding to this entire stationary system a chaos of infinite variables from the most minimal movement on our part.
But even though this could seem like a mere representation of what we can’t see for ourselves, beyond the persistence of vision, it connects with our most visceral side, combining the intangible beauty of the represented graphic with the brutality of the sound it produces, creating a hypnotic environment of audible results and unique visual stimulations. Tangibly, the installation is made up of two turbines, supported by a tuning fork structure between which the waves are created.
Nonetheless, it is the intangible, the process created there, which provides sense to the space it occupies and establishes a relationship with the public, who begin to discover that their movements have an influence on the space, sound, and alternate states of great agitation with others when they stop to see how the wave disappears in space like a whistle in the wind.”
Courtesy of Daniel Palacios