The sonically alive sculpture by Cildo Meireles was ginormous and needed a whole room to contain it’s physical presence and sound alone. Essentially the piece was composed as a tower built from different consumer radios stacked in a somewhat chronological order from date of manufacture, each radio tuned to certain stations, unused frequencies or somewhere in between.

At the time of viewing, I spent up to about five minutes with the piece. What I found very interesting was all the radios were assigned to different stations using different radio technologies. Because of this and the ambience of the gallery space, the overall piece reminded me of being in a public place like a shopping centre or a canteen due to the mass amalgamation of constant noises, chatter and music enveloped by the acoustics. In a similar way, I was able to pick out snippets of audio information as you do when focusing the mind on something that particularly catches your attention amid a hubbub of chatter. 

In another way, it is interesting how the piece will never really stop creating sound because it is constantly streaming live broadcasts and therefore it almost feels alive because it is not a recording or scripted creation: Not one day from the other will it truly sound the same.

In another hypocritical viewpoint, after five minutes spent with the piece, it became unbearable to listen as the mass of sounds constantly emanating from the multitude of speakers lost any meaning or pleasure to the ear due to the acoustics of the gallery. Every broadcast washed into another and soon it felt like being at the floor of a pool filled with noise. Although the piece makes it’s point in the title as soon the listener understands that the human condition is so divided and subjective like the biblical story states.