MADE IN CYLAND
CEPH, PURPURNIY DYADYA, SERGEI KOMAROV & LIDIIA GRIAZNOVA, NIKITA BUGAEV, THE CONCEPT HORSE
PHENOMENON AND PARADOXES OF INFORMATION TRANSMISSION
multi-channel sound installation, 2025
set of autonomous, battery-powered speaker modules
This installation is dedicated to the engineers, experimenters, and artists who investigated the connections between sound, technology, and transmission. The need to receive, process, and send signals as quickly and efficiently as possible opened a distinct field of knowledge in telecommunication technologies. Some of its aspects—telephony, signal processing, radio transmission, and speech synthesis—opened up new ways to apply both scientific and artistic imagination.
What followed these inventions (to name just a few): number stations, ham radio, vocoders, and early speech-coding systems, became, in itself, a subject of artistic practice and experimentation for those whom Justin Patrick Moore, a radio enthusiast and writer, described as “Madcap inventors [who] attempted to trace their way through the lines of circuitry to create sounds out of the chaos.”
Work with sound at the institutional level, in experimental studios such as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Bell Labs, and NHK Japan, as well as the activities of independent enthusiasts of the 1970s “sound-phreak” culture—particularly Evan Doorbell’s recordings of telephone switching and routing sounds, which document the acoustic environment of early communication systems—together with the technologies themselves, shaped and contributed to the sonic landscape.
The artists contributed their own sonic environments as reflections on this trajectory of sound and music making.
Each artist was provided with a set of autonomous, battery-powered speaker modules designed and built in the CYLAND MediaArtLab workshop. Each channel functions as a stand-alone piece and simultaneously as part of a collective multi-channel work. One could listen to a single artist’s group of speakers or combine them with others, rearranging the units in space and shaping new sound combinations in real time. This constantly changing acoustic environment blended with the Botanical Garden’s regular sounds, revealing shifting relationships between signal, interference, and spatial perception.
Based on the installation, a release was produced for the CYLAND Audio Archive. You can listen to it here:
