Landstape was completed with support and production of M2F Créations.
Lanstape plays with the usual robotics training: a robot must follow a line on the fl oor. In this artistic installation, the line is made of magnetic audio tape, and the robot is equipped with head and speakers to read the tape.
A magnetic tape draws a circuit on the fl oor, crossed by a bunch of little robots. Each one of them reads the lines of the circuit with its head, and displays sound with amplifi er and speaker. The sound is read exactly where it’s been recorded, on the tape. Sound becomes a linear material, a kind of hidden landscape turned visible by the reading of the tape, just like when car light beam fl ashes landscape at night on the road. This invisible soundscape is only perceptible by the audience who needs to reconstruct mentally the whole picture, made physically perceptible by fl ashes of sound when the robot reads the tape line. Yet things aren’t that predictable: once a day, a particular robot bearing a recorder and microphone runs through the whole circuit. Sound parts move through space, the soundscape is rewritten and enriched with the different sounds and noises of the day made by the audience. Day after day, sounds gradually mix: the soundscape is disorganized and gets confusing.
Noise invades space. Entropy wins and chaos invades it all.
