- Artist
- Oswaldo Maciá born 1960
- Medium
- Audio, 16 channels, megaphone speakers, wall diagram and paper leaflets
- Dimensions
- Duration: 30min
Overall display dimensions variable - Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased 2010
- Reference
- T13319
Summary
Something Going On Above My Head is a sound installation comprising sixteen speakers which play a symphony made of the songs of two thousand birds from Africa, America, Asia and Europe. It can be displayed either within the gallery or in an outdoor location, and is accompanied by a leaflet designed by the artist and a diagram on canvas showing the layout of a symphonic orchestra in which the instruments have been replaced by the names of birds. For five years, Maciá collected birdsongs from international ornithological archives and audio libraries. After obtaining two thousand recordings of birdsongs, he divided them into four groups: five hundred from Asia, five hundred from Africa, five hundred from America, and five hundred from Europe. He then reworked all this sound material to compose a symphony scored according to the birds’ pitches, and distributed the different parts in the display space following the places allocated to different instruments in a symphonic orchestra. Tate’s copy is number two in an edition of three.
The work has been exhibited extensively, at X-Teresa, Mexico D.F. in 1999, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 2000, Event Uppsala, Sweden in 2000, the Tirana Biennale, Albania in 2001, Afroamerica, Haiti in 2002, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid in 2003, The Power Plant, Toronto in 2003, Haunch of Venison, London in 2004, at the Daros Collection, Zurich in 2005 and at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. Although the installation is reconfigured for each venue, its basic format always remains the same: a group of sixteen speakers placed either high on gallery walls or high up in the branches of trees in outdoor locations, mimicking a treetop cacophony of sound from which single birdsongs occasionally stand out. Either way, the visitor experiences a chorus above their head, much in the way that true birdsong is experienced. However this apparent truth to nature is belied by the artificiality of the symphonic arrangement. Writing about the work, critic Sally O’Reilly has said:
Analogies might be drawn with the endless variability of societies and individuals, or we can consider this piece in less anthropomorphic terms: not only we don’t understand any of these avian messages, we are unlikely to hear a vast number of them again, as Something Going on Above My Head represents an entirely imaginary ecosystem that could not occur in the wild.
(O’Reilly 2006, p.58.)
The title of this work illustrates Maciá’s interest in the different meanings that language conveys. His titles often encourage multiple interpretations, offering both a literal and a figurative approach to the work. As well as describing the actual physical nature of the work, the phrase Something Going on Above My Head also alludes to the myriad daily events that go unnoticed by the majority of the population. The work was triggered by a headline that the artist came across while reading the World News section in The Guardian newspaper. The article referred to Russian submarines dumping nuclear residues in the Baltic Sea. Maciá was alarmed that such news would only appear as a brief note that could be easily missed among all the other information in the paper. Thus the work developed as an allegory of the selective character of the information that we as citizens receive. This notion also connects with the common perception of birdsong as something aesthetically beautiful and pleasing, a view that is the result of a lack of understanding that birdsongs often express a sense of distress, a threat or a mechanism of defence. Maciá’s use of animal sounds is not simply an appropriation of natural phenomena, but a way to draw attention to the often overlooked soundscape of nature.
Colombian-born Maciá regularly works with sound to create installations which he refers to as ‘sound sculptures’. He uses sound as a means to give form to the surrounding space. He often builds sound archives, either by going to libraries around the world, or by working with communities and recording the sounds directly. He has also collaborated with practitioners from other disciplines to reflect a broader sensory and anthropological scope within his work. Much of his practice is a response to the dominance of sight over the other senses in a spectacle-driven culture. In his view, this dominance has created a deaf society, where the majority of people’s or animals’ voices are not heard.
Further reading
Cantos Cuentos Colombianos, exhibition catalogue, Contemporary Colombian Art, Daros Collection, Zurich 2004, pp.113–39.
Carlos Jiménez, ‘La memoria inagotable de las voces’, Art Nexus, vol.5, no.60, March–May 2006, pp.56–61.
Sally O’Reilly, ‘Oswaldo Maciá’, Modern Painters, September 2006, pp.56–8.
Carmen Juliá
May 2010
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.
Display caption
Something Going On Above My Head brings together over two thousand birdsongs from across the world, arranged like instruments in an orchestra. The artist spent five years collecting birdcalls from audio archives and libraries. He then reworked them into a symphony.
Maciá challenges the definition of sculpture as a visual art form. Something Going On Above My Head highlights the amount of information surrounding us, and questions our ability to comprehend this indistinguishable background noise.
Gallery label, April 2021
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.
Explore
- abstraction(8,612)
-
- non-representational(6,161)
- formal qualities(12,442)
-
- audio(5)
- diagrammatic(799)
- music and entertainment(2,331)
-
- orchestra(14)
- scientific and measuring(791)
-
- map(110)
- inscriptions(6,670)
-
- Latin text(150)
You might like
-
Joseph Mallord William Turner Cochem on the River Mosel, from above the Enderttal
1840 -
Enrique Grau Jewel Box
1977 -
Joseph Mallord William Turner A Tower on a Crag above a Bridge among Mountains ?in the Dolomites
1840 -
Joseph Mallord William Turner Sketches; One of the Hills above Baden, and Another of the Rhine
c.1841 -
Joseph Mallord William Turner Town in Valley, with Castle on Rock Above
c.1841 -
Joseph Mallord William Turner Burg Sooneck, on the River Rhine; the Heimburg above Niederheimbach
1840 -
Joseph Mallord William Turner The Drachenfels, with Burg Drachenfels above Königswinter on the River Rhine
1840 -
Joseph Mallord William Turner Town, with Castle above on Rock
1844 -
Joseph Mallord William Turner Harbour, with Castle on Hill Above
1845 -
Jeremy Deller The Battle of Orgreave Archive (An Injury to One is an Injury to All)
2001 -
Cildo Meireles Eureka/Blindhotland
1970–5 -
Martin Creed Work No. 227: The lights going on and off
2000