Opening of the installation ‘Rainbow Audio Transformation’ at Extra City, Antwerp, Friday 11 January 2008, 20:00


This project brings 12 artists together working on a collective experiment on the relation between colour and sound, departing from the 7 colours of the rainbow, with white and black added. Each artist and/or collective works on a specific colour, using both intuition and scientific sources, and will produce a looped sound piece. After approximately one month of experiments, all artists come together in Antwerp for some days, after which these individual works will be synthesized into one collective installation, made up of 9 sound works played simultaneously.

The participating artist is working with the following frequencies:

RED = Mike Harding, wavelength of roughly 625-750 nm
Mike Harding's piece Red is composed from images of Chairman Mao Tse-tung [Mao Zedong] converted to sound using Coagula [Industrial Strength Color-Note Organ by Rasmus Ekman], and a variety of red light bulbs recorded with a BATBOX Duet [frequency range 2kHz - 128 kHz]

ORANGE = Philip Marshall, wavelength of roughly 585-620 nm
Hydrophone recording of an orange being squeezed, contact mic recording of an orange being peeled, feedback from an Orange mobile phone, spectral analysis of a range of orange pantones.

YELLOW = Finnbogi Pétursson, wavelength of roughly 570-580 nm
Yellow 349.2 Hz, solarplexus, the central chakra in the human chakra system. Varies 7.4Hz up and down and activates the circumferences, the earth harmonics and passes by the alpha brain waves at 7.25
Hz.

GREEN = Maia Urstad, wavelength of roughly 520-570 nm

BLUE = Leon Milo, wavelength of roughly 440-490 nm

INDIGO = Brandon LaBelle, wavelength of roughly 450-420 nm
evening hours / walking quiet streets / hum of the city in the distance / and the trickle of water in the gutter

VIOLET = Jana Winderen, wavelength of roughly 380-420 nm
Violet borders on the UV light range of the electromagnetic spectrum, invisible to humans but visible to bats and some insects who also use frequencies for spatial orientation and navigation.

WHITE = CM von Hausswolff, all colors of the visible light spectrum
Twelve sinewave signals between 400Hz and 8000Hz filtered through two sinewave oscillators seven times again using frequencies between 400Hz and 8000Hz. Final sound faded up and down three times within the framework of twelve minutes.

BLACK = Building Transmissions, absorbs all the colors of the visible spectrum and reflects none of them
ALL COLORS FADE TO BLACK. "...while the idea of an object with gravity strong enough to prevent light from escaping was proposed in the 18th century, black holes, as presently understood, are described by Einstein's theory of general relativity, developed in 1916. This theory predicts that when a large enough amount of mass is present within a sufficiently small region of space, all paths through space are warped inwards towards the center of the volume, forcing all matter and radiation to fall inward."

Supported by OCA, Office for Contemporary Art, Norway.

Five photos by Jana Winderen; Photo by Nico DOCKX; Images from the installation process of the RAT-project; Leon, Maia, Brandon, Kris and Nico; Maia, Kris and Nico; Leon, Mike and Brandon; Carl Michael, Leon and Maia; Philip hydrophoning an orange; Philip, Mike, Jana and Brandon; Chris, Nico, Mike and Finnbogi.