11 minute loop, YouTube livestreams, narrator’s voice filtered through TikTok AI audio “Gigi,” directional speakers
Video chapters, usually seen in a loop so that any could be the start of the cycle:
Spinning (Introduction) Romance (Dung Beetles, Part 1) -Octave (2:1 for BlueGreen and Red Hot)- BlueGreen -Second Octave (4:1 for Red Hot)- Red Hot Riding Hood -Fifth (3:2 for Flight)- Flight (Dung Beetles, Part 2) -Fourth (4:3 for Flight and Cherry Pit)- Cherry Pit (Riddle Song) Ears and Yolks -Prime (1:1 for Cherry Pit and Ocean Floor)- Ocean Floor
Unreliable narrators have to consider, more than most, who gets the privilege of being believed.
Gigi’s stream-of-consciousness overlays its peculiar voice, both endearing and metallic. It is perhaps the curious point of view that I (Annie) wish could be trusted.
Structure of the video chapters:
The speed of soundwaves at music intervals, the distances between two notes, were translated into moving, visual ‘chapter headings.’ In between, Gigi’s voice emerges as the wolf interval: a dissonance in Western music theory’s Platonic system, which reveals the inaccurate idealism of the “circle of fifths.” (In the material of sound, this circle is actually an ever-expanding spiral.)
In modern piano tuning, this dissonant gap is frequently divided and redistributed across all intervals. Obscuring it sacrifices the so-called “perfect” intervals to avoid the truth-telling wolf interval. The narrator takes up this avoidance in favor of what goes unheard, instead proposing an imagined persona of the wolf interval, one that slips slightly out of step with the system, in order to share something it still loves.
Installation materials:
Tablets and ultrasonic directional speakers, causing the voice to bounce from floor to ceiling into zones viewers pass through.
Used pneumatic air cylinder, used PVC tubes from waste management, fire pit lid, thumbtacks, pistachio shells, carved pencils.
Tablet stands and kinetic pieces: steel, altered Manhasset music stands, scrap metal cut-offs, drawing compasses, sheet music clip, tracing paper, hydraulic bottle jack, air valve, plumbing adapters, cast urethane rubber stoppers.
Wall drawing: cigarette and newspaper ash.
Accompanying writing, currently unpublished, traces Western music theory’s dissonant wolf interval through non/chronological time. Sound waves are used to demonstrate an abiding material underlying constructed languages and systems. The installation is addressed in four categories: translations of Hz soundwaves to silent video interludes; image/literacy and the language development stage of babble; attention, string tension, and mediated patterns of the unheard, unseen, or unknown; and air pressure.
Brief asides from Gigi, the same narrator as the video, interject. She touches on enforced secrets, legendary blacksmiths as a tool to question the fictive and non-fictive binary, extinction and cyclical time, and the sometimes unrequited love of maintenance.
