The film shows footage of bees, recalling Wilfred Sellars’ anecdotes about bees dancing in clover fields in “Some Reflections on Language Games”. The bees dance to the exhibition, as audible ultrasonic beams in the exhibition space inform the video work, such that parameters for a visual editing system (such as playback and rendering) are arranged and assorted, thus constantly determining the navigation of the bees, in real time.
The title, Memory magnified by memory of course refers to “active modulation” as behavior; i.e. the conscious and deliberate adaptation of behavior, attention and response in order to cope better with a situation. For the work, the speakers are built by hand using the following principle: modulated ultrasound propagates through a nonlinear medium, which acts as a passive demodulator, producing audible sound without an active element: A transducer can be made to project a narrow beam of modulated ultrasound that is powerful enough, at 100 to 110 dBSPL, to change the speed of sound in the air that it passes through. The air within the beam behaves nonlinearly and extracts the modulation signal from the ultrasound, resulting in sound that can be heard only along the path of the beam, or that appears to radiate from any surface that the beam strikes.
Taking the interactions of social and economic life as its starting point, this thesis examines the diverse ways in which we describe and experience meaning. In doing so, it draws on systems of information organization in which images form a series, words take on a grammatical structure, and life is understood in terms of its characteristics.
Ilinca Fechete (b. 2002) was born in Târgu Mureș and currently lives in Munich. Her art encompasses photography, installation, sculpture, sound, video, drawing and text. Her studio practice is centered on the visual as a curatorial concept, cause and functionalism from philosophical theory, psychosocial cognition, linguistics and real events.
