David Link
Chorus 1.0 - Installation - 2005
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 6
Installation
The antique oracle of Pharai worked in the following way: You whispered your question into the ear of a statue, then walked away quickly to the marketplace, your ears shut. The first word or sentence you heard there after opening your ears again was the oracle’s answer. By exposing yourself to the public murmur, you choose your answer and at the same time you don’t, as you selected this particular moment instinctively. But the local chorus is always present, a word processor that will respond to all your questions. CHORUS is an installation in local public space. Public space is symbolic space. In a certain time segment it is concerned with a limited set of topics. A current war or disease, a sport event or a crime, political decisions or television shows create a flow of themes that is discussed by almost everybody on a certain day. By means of localized information gathering in the internet, the CHORUS-software detects these daily topics and starts commenting on them. The output of the machine is shown on an elliptic LED display. Information from other geographic and cultural contexts is used to contrast local knowledge and discussion. The installation is accompanied by murmuring sounds recorded on site. The text is generated by the machine itself analyzing the enormous amounts of information available in the internet. No sentence from this input appears in the output. Though the text is articulated and syntactically correct, it preserves an erratic quality that differentiates it from statements of human speakers and engages the public in different possible interpretations. Produced by: Le Fresnoy - Studio national Technical support: Klatho GmbH, Hamburg
