Artists Statement

INTERFACING SOUND

Babel-On is a sound-based audio-video work exploring the melodic and rhythmic dimensions of human spoken language. This sound and four large-scale projection digital video piece with synchronized sound focuses on languages as musical instruments of communication and concentrates on the sound of human verbal expression rather than on its meaning.

The work features close-up video images of a multitude of people of numerous nationalities and races speaking in their respective Languages about these very languages. With its language-based sonic accompaniment, it creates a
polyphonic chorus of voices and idioms in continuous interplay, correspondence and/or conflict, suggesting various relationships between diverse geo-political regions, cultural traditions and civilizations. Babel-On is intended to create a very physical, living audio-video flow of associations and dissociations, of different tensions, between image and sound, speech and music, words and significations, intention and chance – a constant flux of unstable, slipping, shifting anings and perceptions. It is an experiential piece that evokes the non-verbal itilities of vocal communication.

Babel-On is a collaboration between New York intermedia artist/composer Phill Niblock and Montreal video/multimedia artist Katherine Liberovskaya.

• KATHERINE LIBEROVSKAYA (CA) is a Montreal-born multidisciplinary artist who has been working predominantly with experimental video and multimedia since the late eighties.
• PHILL NIBLOCK (CA) is an intermedia artist using music, film, photography, video and computers.

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