Working On: Anri Sala - The Last Resort

This work points the finger at the original ideas of the Enlightenment and the realities they produced.

Anri Sala

Anri Sala’s ‘The Last Resort’ saw the Observatory Hill Rotunda transformed into a fully immersive audio experience. Set against the breathtaking views of the harbour below, audiences were invited to move beneath an ensemble of suspended drums, to experience their rhythmic, live response to a contemporary interpretation of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Acting as technical advisor on this project our role was to bring the first international project utilising L-Acoustics immersive spatialisation technology, ‘L-ISA’. This mammoth undertaking would require a system that could deal with the spatialisation of a full orchestral recording across a 42 speaker array as well as the panning movement across the sound field to create the drum ‘choreography’. Overcoming the numerous technical challenges with the assistance of Guillaume Le Nost of L-Acoustics we where able to provide a solid platform on which Anri’s Team could start creating. Mixer Olivier Goinard was able to utilise the L-ISA software to create a dynamic piece of art that plays off the ideas of performance and localisation in a breathtaking exchange of live and recorded music. This musical dialogue animated the relationship between sound, place, time and history on this evocative site.

Read more about it on the Kaldor Public Art Projects’ Website