User:Inge Hoonte/Machine Part No.2

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 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 its first installations, the piece was performed with speakers hung from the ceiling of the Grand Hall at La Villette, and featured midi controlled sound movement. In the Grand Hall, there was one ideal place to hear the sounds, and so she 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)