CD Sea by Bruce Munro

The way we consume or media changes and changes. While the CD brought ‘crystal clear’ digital audio into our living rooms, a few decades later, while some people still like them, many of us hardly ever touch them again. They just sit there in that box, collecting dust.

Why not use all these unused CDs to create a piece of art? Bruce Munro collected 600.000 old CDs for his installation CD Sea. A field full of them. And while the installation is visually striking, it is also a bit sad in a way. These pieces of plastic, these pieces of music, once cherished, now thrown away. Also watch this short video about the installation process:

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"Silence, Please"

Some sounds border on silence. They are unnoticed, ignored, but gently surround us every day. There is no complete silence in our world, even in our quietest moments. That is what "Silence, Please" illustrates.

Chris Kubick created a catalog of these sounds. He codified these sounds in the form of text (wrote them out on transparencies), thus creating a silent 'sound installation'. This catalog "attempts to represent peace, tranquility, emptiness".

If this installation just makes visitors more aware of the sounds around them, it already serves its purpose, in my opinion.

Extended Play

What we hear and what we see are equally important, that is my opinion. Even while watching a movie, the right sound and the right music at the right moment can make us cry or make us laugh.

Sound artist Janek Schaefer creates sound installations that not only sound great but also look wonderful. Even the color and intensity of the light is carefully chosen.

Extended play is a very personal conceptual sound installation in which the unsynchronized sound of nine vintage turn tables is combined. The concept is best described by the artist himself. To hear the story behind Extended Play, watch the video on his website.

You can visit a retrospective of Schaefer's sound based work at the Bluecoat gallery, Liverpool, until January 17th, 2010.

Ice Records

For Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull, artist Katie Paterson recorded the sound of three glaciers in Iceland. She then pressed these sounds on three records made of the melt water of these three glaciers. Three turn tables played the records for nearly two hours until they completely melted. A sample of one of the records can be heard here. 

It seems like the ultimate piece of conceptual art. Next to that it points at present environmental problems like global warming an the perishability of our planet in a beautiful, subtle way. 

(via Joachim Baan)