Maintaining three actions

Seafarers find their bearings at sea by means of natural points located along the coast. All you have to do is to identify three such landmarks in complementary directions so as to be able to construct a triangle which inevitably contains your ship. This triangle is called the triangle of uncertainty.

The audio installation Le triangle d'Incertitude (Triangle of Uncertainty) by French composer Cécile le Prado, presented at Ars Electronica 97, substitutes these visual landmarks with acoustic ones, thereby constructing a triangle of uncertainty on the ground of a fictive, virtual space on the basis of sound recordings she made at the southern tip of Ireland (Fastnet Rock), the western edge of France (Bretagne), and the westernmost point of Spain (Cabo Finisterre). (Ars Electronica 97 catalog)

In a later performance, the piece made use of Dolby 5.1 to completely envelop its audience in an immersive listening environment. In its first installations however, the piece was performed with speakers hung from the ceiling of the Grand Hall at La Villette, and featured a midi controlled sound movement. In the Grand Hall, there was one ideal place to hear the sounds, and so Le Prado placed beach chairs at that point to lie in, to encourage people to hear the sounds of the sea in a proper attitude. (Warren Burt, Immersion Festival, 1999)

Spatially, as well experientially, an interesting conceptual shift takes place. For sailors, the boat is inevitably the center point of the equation, based on its three external coordinates. With Le Prado having recorded her material on specific locations, thereby affixing the sound to a coordinate, it automatically places the listener in the center of the piece. The listener becomes the boat.

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