Artspeak

A Set of Suspicions presents a fall series of exhibitions and events by artists investigating ideas of threat, security and surveillance. The works use the gallery space to index specific off-locations: the proposed street cameras just beyond our doors; the hyper-watched financial district of London, England; a university biotech lab; and the mobile 'watching machines' that orbit the earth. A Set of Suspicions integrates visual art, writing, video, performance, electronics design and music composition to consider the proliferation of technology, privacy, public identities and cultural habits of interpretation.

As the first in this series of exhibitions, Artspeak is pleased to present La Salle des Noeuds (pedestrian movements). Drawing on research completed in the summer of 1999 at the STEIM centre for electroacoustic research in Amsterdam, Vancouver artist Daniel Jolliffe and Quebec composer and artist Jocelyn Robert have developed a collaborative sound installation work which takes as its central theme and process the surveillance network of global positioning satellites in constant orbit around the earth. The installation makes use of the 'cyber sky' composition of US military/aerospace GPS technology, established to aid in military applications and designed for precision, control and certitude. This technology has found mass market applications from automobile design to recreation and is used in this new work as both method and subject of artistic inquiry.

La Salle des Noeuds (pedestrian movements) takes the information on the position and identifier data of the orbiting overhead satellite network, and converts it to music played by a stationary grand piano. By inverting the technologies and their intended use, the work playfully subverts notions of military and computer-based accuracy. La Salle des Noeuds (pedestrian movements) streams, sifts, chops up and spits out the continuous data flow meant for the single purpose of navigating human movement and fixing civilian and military locations. The resultant stream is processed and parsed by a sound composing system which tries to make musical sense of the network's activities. The compositionally unpredictable outcome is a unique aural narrative for each of the earth's rotations, informed by the satellites' position and the reconfiguration of the data provided, placing the viewer at the centre of an enormous network, watching and hearing the movements of the satellites themselves.