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MIT List Visual Arts Center announce Hourly Directional: Helen Mirra and Ernst Karel

The MIT List Visual Arts Center presents Hourly Directional: Helen Mirra and Ernst Karel an exhibition on view February 7–April 6, 2014.

For a number of years, Helen Mirra has been walking in different parts of the world as a means of generating works. Often the materialized aspect is a kind of paced printmaking or terse field notes she makes at intervals over the course of the day, and in some cases, Mirra and Ernst Karel collaborate on hourly location recordings. Hourly directional sound recording, Mata Atlântica, Brazil (2012) is a quadraphonic sound installation by Mirra and Karel composed of location recordings made during eleven days of walking in remnants of coastal rainforest in southeastern Brazil.

Stopping once each hour, Mirra and Karel used a compass to locate magnetic north. Two consecutive one-minute stereo recordings were made by holding microphones at the ends of outstretched arms, the first with arms out to north and south, and the second with arms out to east and west. At a distance from the microphones that increases each hour, the sound of a triangle, rung with a wooden mallet, indicates the direction of the path at that moment. The triangle sounds for one second in the first hour, two seconds in the second hour, three in the third, and so on, and at the start of the minute in the first hour, after seven seconds in the second hour, after fourteen in the third, and so on. These two-channel recordings were then paired for quadraphonic playback.

MIT List Visual Arts Center
20 Ames St.
Cambridge, MA
listart.mit.edu