Ian Andrews

Sound Drift, 2005, Interactive sound art,in collaboration with Timo Kahlen, Berlin, http://www.staubrauschen.de/sounddrift/

Sound Drift, 2005 by Timo Kahlen (Berlin) and Ian Andrews (Sydney) allows the visitor to meander through a series of exhibition spaces that contain floating, drifting, interactive ‘clouds’ filled with the pulsing, twittering, hissing, dirty static noise of interfering radio waves inbetween stations. Each interactive ’cloud’ - clicked at - leads to the next room. Conceived as a site-specific work for the gallery space at the Ruine der Künste Berlin - remodelled by Kahlen to a smaller scale from recycled cardboard, then photographed -, ‘Sound Drift’ shows the transparent volume of air of the ‘empty’ exhibition space to be already full of information, full of of data and sound: “Since 1987, Kahlen has been compiling an archive that refers to something which can not be seen, nor kept. An archive of pulsing, gurgling, twittering, rustling, whispering static sound and noise from the radio: temporary, nomadic, ephemeral sounds of interfering radio waves recorded inbetween radio stations. Since the early 1990s, this bewitching technological din, roar and racket, this unheard of, unexplored, earcatching ‘noise & beauty’, these interfering streams of electromagnetic and acoustic data encompassing the globe, have been the base to a number of Kahlen‘s sound sculptures and sound installations, in which the sound of interfering radio waves seems to occupy previously ‘empty‘, open spaces and transparent volumes” (Werner Ennokeit: “Noise & Beauty” in “Timo Kahlen: Noise & Beauty. 25 Years of Media Art”, Berlin 2010).