A series of sound installations across three floors at the the Senate House Library, born as a collaboration between the library and Artangel. It explores weather as both local and global phenomena, the connection between the environment, language, sound and silence.
Instigated by writer Jessica J. Lee who worked with a group of other UK-based poets of different mother tongues, each choosing and defining ten weather words in Arabic, Bengali, English, German, French, Mandarin, Polish, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. The words where then translated to form a thousand-word multilingual ‘dictionary’, that proposes share language to describe our changing environment while exploring the nuance of meaning in translation.
The sound produced by sound artist Claudia Molitor is a combination of recordings of this multilingual ‘dictionary’ and real time sonification of data from the Met Office, enabling sound to be determined by the weather outside.
The first installation, Weather Notes, is a four channel piece inspired by the relationship between folklore and the science of meteorology, and the art and the science of weather. The four speakers are placed in each corner of the room, accompanied by a few sets of headphones. Each of the channels are playing the same sound, a soft whisper occasionally joined by strings and percussion.
The two pieces on the fifth floor both have the sound source placed within a window frame and are only very hearable when sitting right next to it. The first window faces a garden and the sound matches the view: humming and crackling. The second window is overlooking the city, the view blocked by roofs: the sound is more suggestive of labour, somewhat more metallic.
The piece on the sixth floor is a stereo sound installation playing meteorology terms in different languages, which brings us back to the global aspect of weather. The words are printed on a panel which I found gives it a mythological flavour
What was interesting to me was the choice of location and the public the work was aimed at. As an exhibition visitor, having the installations placed in a library means there is a constant feeling of intrusion. As a library user, on the other hand, works along with their concept would probably be easily missed or overlooked.
Also, as this was a site visit part of the Spatialisation unit, I found the installations a bit underwhelming. The only piece employing more than two speaker was using the additional channels only to repeat the same sound across the room making little creative use of the spatialisation aspect.