Prau / Prat (Meadow) engages with the idea of the soundscape as an ecosystem to build an acoustic and visual context in which nothing is what it seems and where technology emulates the natural world.
Understood as a symbolic landscape, the meadow is made up of a top visible layer of vegetation that extends as far as the eye can see, like a homogeneous and compact blanket. Under the surface is a second invisible yet audible layer that tells us what is happening there though countless acts of communication, calls and messages emitted by the different species of insects that populate these ecosystems.
This is a sound and visual installation consisting of a system of speakers that recreates the soundscape of a meadow in Asturias. However, appearances are deceptive, given that the sounds we hear have actually been created artificially using electromagnetic waves produced by computers and mobile devices.
Electromagnetic fields are waves that the human ear cannot hear and go unnoticed to us but which are nevertheless ever-present in our day-to-day lives. Like insects in the meadow which we hear but cannot see, these waves surround us and are produced by our mobile phones and computers.
In Prau / Prat these waves were recorded and transformed to make them audible for humans. During the process a bank of sounds that imitate nature electronically was compiled. The result is a fake ecosystem, a still life created from electronic elements, bits of sound and glitches that, when re-configured, imitate an imagined nature.
Like the meadow, this piece hides beneath its surface a whole communicative universe, an endless dialogue in which our own mobile devices are the source of the sounds of a perverse, deceptive and synthetic ecosystem.
Ultimately, the work poses questions on the ubiquity of contemporary communication systems, the invisibility of electromagnetic waves and the effects of the so-called Anthropocene on natural systems and ecology in the wider sense of the term.
Prau / Prat is the winning project in the call for the 7th DKV Seguros – Álvarez Margaride Production Grant, organised jointly by LABoral and the DKV health insurance company.
