The Sounds of Fire

Work:

The piece I chose was IR Chorus by Jesse Stiles. It’s an installation made up of 10 lit candles in a circle. Above each candle, there’s a infrared sensor connected to a Stereo Amplifier and an Arduino Mini, which convert the candlelight into sound played from speakers.

I found it compelling because first, I liked the idea of converting the silent fire into sound based off the thermal energy it gives off. Second, I appreciated the visual aspect of the piece. It reminded me of crop circles and demonic circles, which made gave it a little bit of an otherworldly feel.

The wires that connected all of the sensors and the wires coming off of the sensors themselves gave the piece a spidery form and also an electrical look that I appreciated as an ECE major. Finally, I work with Arduinos and sensors a lot in the club I’m in, so I was also honestly interested in how all of the wiring worked.

Experience and Response:

The first thing I noticed was that the artwork was kind of in its own corner of the gallery. Although it was openly connected to the rest of the room, it was in its own space. This portion of the room didn’t have any direct lighting above it, probably to allow the candlelight to be the primary source of light, which made me feel integrated into the piece. 

The guy in the picture was making a lot of sounds by interacting with the exhibit he was standing in front of, which annoyed me at first. However, after a while I realized that as the artist hadn’t provided headphones like some of the other exhibits in the collection or asked for a separated room, perhaps I was supposed to experience it with background noises kind of like how a fire is often the center of many other activities.

The sound given off by the piece was a kind of tinny sound that reminded me of how a large bell sounds right after it is hit. 

I also noticed that some of the candles didn't have much wax left, which indicated to me that the curators at the gallery must be involved in keeping the piece going.

Product:

First I put the short audio recording I took on my phone from the exhibit into Audacity to get the following visual representation of the audio.

Next I looked up what an Mini Arduino looks like. Looking at the image, I decided to represent the location of candles as the black diamond shape on the Arduino.

Finally I started actually working on my abstraction using PaintTool SAI. I altered the colors of the audio to yellow, to represent the candlelight. I flipped and stretched copies of the image and placed them in a stripe pattern over the canvas to represent the sounds in the air created by the candles.

Next I made a circle shape underneath all the sound as an abstraction of the shape the candles were placed in, and placed black diamonds to represent the locations of the candles and Arduinos. 

The ways in which I layered the representation of the sounds with the abstraction of the visual element of the piece shows how the sound seemed to be the focus. 

Reflection:

I learned how to look at the different aspects of the artwork and think about how to combine them in an abstraction. I also found how difficult it is to copy and paste images in SAI.  If I were to do it again, I would do it faster so at the end I would have time to alter the colors of the sounds to give it more dimension and a wider range of color. 

Other than that, I think I captured the experience pretty well. The symmetry in the image capture the mechanical and un-human aspects of the work, while the color choice convey the fire, and the changes in amplitude of the sound mimic the flickering of the flames. The jarring contrast between the fire/candle and the electrical equipment is reflected in the choice of black color against an otherwise yellow canvas.