Digital principles are “reductive” in their own essence, as they’re committed to the unavoidable task of quantifying any type of information into numbers. This methodology is constantly and considerably applied to the majority of productions and transmissions of human-managed sound on Earth. Lost in binary Translation by Lukas Truniger is a kinetic sound installation based on sixty-four electromechanical relays and a radio receiver with an antenna. It endlessly scans the radio spectrum, then analyses it through specific software. The received sounds are then digitised and translated into coherent clicks and noises produced by the respective relays. Some of the original information is kept, mainly in rhythms, and tentatively in density and timbre. But the resulting mechanical aesthetic attributes are sonically preponderant, inevitably, accomplishing a planned “loss” that codifies a machine reinterpretation of the original transmission.

 

Lukas Truniger – Lost in binary Translation