Siren is an evocative and ephemeral sound installation that temporarily transforms its immediate environment. Disembodied voices travel into a flood of sound and harmony, reaching a frenetic pitch before fading back into stillness and silence.
This work was originally designed for the tower of the Perth Institute of Contemporary in Western Australia. It was activated once per day at nautical sunset and was accompanied by an installation of pulsing light. Siren loosely references the maritime symbols of the lighthouse, which guides lost ships away from a hazardous shore, and the siren, whose haunting voice lures sailors to their deaths. Siren plays on tensions between drowning and drying, loss and desire, memory and forgetting, consciousness and oblivion.
Siren developed through collaborations between artist Thea Costantino, composer Tim Cunniffe and an amateur choir, the Churchlands Choral Society. The choristers have shared not only their voices but also their experiences in the creation of this work. Costantino developed the libretto based on the choir’s thoughts and experiences of loss and recovery, from which Cunniffe constructed Siren’s sound world, leading to an ephemeral and poetic reactivation of space and an opportunity for pause and reflection in the night streets.
Audio installation
All rights reserved
[Bio c. 2012] Thea Costantino is an interdisciplinary artist based in Perth, Australia, whose work explores the representation of the past. She holds a PhD from Curtin University, where she also works as an academic in the School of Design and Art. Thea is a member of the collective Hold Your Horses, formed with Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont in 2009. She is a recipient of the 2011 Qantas Foundation Encouragement of Australian Contemporary Art Award and the 2012 Artsource / Gunnery Artist Exchange Program, Artspace, Sydney.
Audible observatories are points of sensory convergence. They are nodes where worlds perceived through the senses intersect and begin the labour of transforming independent events into knowable and meaningful claims. They speak and they are spoken to. Audible Observatories brings together works that draw attention to both the situation and the agency of the observer. The curators for Audible Observatories make a playful connection between research-based art and place-bound exhibition in order to animate a curatorial vision that foregrounds audio-centric art works within a broader rubric of site-specificity. We conceptualize the audible observatory as either a mobile or a stationary...