Wednesday 26th November 

20.00 – 20.20 and 21.00 – 21.20

@ Information Age gallery
Science Museum, Exhibition Road, SW7 2DD London, United Kingdom

Information Age is a newly opened gallery within the Science Museum which celebrates more than 200 years of innovation in communication and information technologies. Artist Atau Tanaka has been invited to respond to the newly commissioned artwork for the gallery, Fiducial Voice Beacons by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Fiducial Voice Beacons is an interactive sound and light installation consisting of beacons situated within the ceiling of the Information Age gallery. Each beacon stores sound recordings that can be heard by visitors using an app on their mobile device. The sound recordings are voice messages that relate to information and have been collected from scientists, poets, artists and thinkers from the past and the present. Visitors are invited to interact with the artwork and to record their own messages thereby replacing the existing ones and producing a quasi-living archive.

In Lozano-Hemmer’s artwork the audience enjoy the relatively personal experience of listening to the audio content through headphones or the speaker on their hand-held device. Atau Tanaka, together with Rebecca Fiebrink, Steph Horak and Adam Parkinson (members of the Embodied Audiovisual Interaction (EAVI) research group) will present two unique performances that transform the usually localised listening experience of the work into a shared, collective event. Tanaka’s performance the installation will be “played” by the performers with the use of smartphones that are plugged into a sound system, creating a moment where the sound of the beacons is rendered palpable to a larger audience.

This event has been organised by MFA curating students from Goldsmiths, University of London.