A real-time, location-aware soundtrack that changes with time of day and the listener’s latitude, inspired by – and written to accompany – Anna Ridler’s Circadian Bloom, a 7-screen work displaying slowly morphing flowers. Inspired by Carl Linneas’s concept of a flower clock, a planted garden that would tell the time through the circadian rhythms of plants, the work explores non-human ways of keeping time.
Created by manipulating samples of orchestral recordings and recordings of insects, each channel of this composition corresponds to one flower and screen of the visual artwork. As the sun moves, each flower appears, opens, closes, and goes to dark according to its species – similarly, the soundtrack moves through different phases, with different music for the phases of dark, pre-bloom, blooming, flower, closing, dawn, and dusk. As the seven flowers change at different times so too do the seven strands of music change and variously recombine. The work is installed spatially, with the screens and accompanying audio separated in space. The audience hears the various strands of music combining and recombining differently as they move between the flowers.
As well as the various upcoming exhibitions of this work, the artwork will also exist within a publicly available app, the timings of the visuals and music personalised to the position of the sun according to the location of the user’s phone. In the app, seven volume controls allow the listener to fade the seven tracks of the audio variously in and out of the experience. We are also in discussions about a special live orchestral version of the piece.
More information can be found here: https://annaridler.com/circadian-bloom
Performances
• Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea
Anna Ridler's Circadian Bloom, her seven-channel video piece with a matching seven-channel audio work by me, is up in Buk-Seoul Museum of Art in South Korea.