Ghost Installation: Cyklopen

I was asked to make this installation on the occasion of Cyklopen’s 5th anniversary celebration in their new building. Cyklopen is an “anarchist cultural house” in the Högdalen neighborhood, a suburb in the south of Stockholm. There was to be a great deal of loud music, crowds, presentations and general festivities, so I decided to make an oasis in the library, where some artworks were hanging. Looking at old maps, I found that the site of Cyklopen had once been a reservoir, fed by streams, but the ground had all been filled in. 

Since Cyklopen hosts D.I.Y. events, I decided this would be a good place to try out an installation driven by an Rpi machine (palm-sized, circuit board computers which, while not very powerful, are fully functional, and cost 35 USD). I built a tiny Pure Data patch, playing and processing only five sound files, because it was all the machine could handle. I then had a box of various tiny bluetooth speakers I had found in sale bins, which I used a mixture of. The sounds were taken from my collection of Stockholm nautical recordings, and the synthesizer sound had a recording of water as one of its controls. The little speakers were fairly quiet as well, which led some festival goers to comment that they were grateful for the softness of the little library and its watery ghosts.