Beyond 6281

In beyond6281, Quebecois sound artists Artificiel send specially composed music through powerful audio amps to power some pretty large light bulbs (and when I say large I mean 1000W and about as big as your head). By amping the power of this audio signal way up they manage to directly excite the filaments in the bulbs causing them to vibrate and emit audible, acoustic sound without the use of conventional speakers. Filtered through the material properties of tungsten and glass the bulbs sing and crackle in a chorus of electronic static: a kind of ghostly synthesized threnody, coursing with electricity.

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It’s all slightly spectral, eerie but also quite magical; ghostly voices, whispered incantations and superheated metal flicker tones around the space as sound is turned into electricity, passed through the bulbs, back into sound again, but also into light, which seethes and flares as the music rises and dies.

And so here you can experience light as a consequence of sound, but then it’s also sound that has been composed specifically to do certain things to the light bulbs, and so to create a meaningful, intimate visual resonance in relation to itself.