The Migration of Data and Other Life Forms 2016 (Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Archivo PAIS)

The Migration of Data and Other Life Forms is a sound installation that sets up a data migration process, which transfers voices from the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt archive and Archivo PAIS – Varchausky’s personal archive of anonymous voices – into a 15 by 4 meter fence that blocks the exhibition space.

Using a series of electro-dynamic transducers, the voices of composers lecturing at Darmstadt since 1946 travel through the fence to meet the anonymous voices of street vendors, informal preachers, institutional announcers and street artists preserved in Archivo PAIS. Before playing them, a computer software analyses their prosody to find similarities in the way these different voices speak and pair them together. By leaning modified stethoscopes against the fence, the audience can listen to the sounds of both archives – the personal and the historic – as they migrate through its surface.