The work’s title: “They in us, We in them”
Author: Yi Yin
Composition: Bare sound amplifier, motor, customized sound player, communication program
Year of creation: ?
The artwork consists of 50 speakers and a mobile interface. The speakers were suspended in the air in different sizes of groups. Viewers can input their voice to the system by speaking a sentence to the mobile interface. The sentence is first played through a high-powered speaker, and when it’s over, 49 low-powered speakers rotate randomly to an angle to play back the messages they stored from the previous audience. After all the speakers are played, the sentence you input will be randomly saved into one of the 49 low-power speakers. Through this process, your voice will join the large group of 50 voices, and become a part of the community.
Here’s a quote from the author, Yi Yin: “‘Vocalization’is the most intimate act by which a subject reveals its existence to others. When a specific sentence is uttered, it is not waiting for an answer in the sense of linguistic structure, but immediately enters the social structure and waits for the response of others in the social structure. Say a word, there must be a response, but is the response logical? Can we decide whether words or sounds will be spoken?”
I like this project because it shows how every one of us is a part of the shared conversation in a very interactive way. In this project, the audience can listen to the voices others left, thus having an idea of what kind of people they are through this inheritance of voice message, and memory. They are also able to make changes to the voice community through their own actions. The project speaks to me that no one is isolated in this society, and all the things we do in life will make a difference in others’ life somehow. The information in human society is a flow and circulation, and it is being refreshed and redefined every single second of human history.
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