Brian House’s new installation takes real-time data from water quality sensors and turns it into sound. The project, titled Animus, is composed of four sheets of metal — iron-oxidized steel, aluminum, copper, and lead — each attached to a microphone and audio transducer, which converts energy into sound. The quality of the sound is manipulated by amplifiers, which receive data from sensors placed in Colorado’s Animus River. As the river changes, so does the sound produced by the installation.
This art installation creates sounds based on real-time data from a polluted river
Brian House
As Prosthetic Knowledge points out, Animus is a comment on environmental degradation. On House’s website, he mentions the 2015 Gold King Mine spill, when a mistake made by the EPA during routine maintenance caused 3 million gallons of wastewater to flood into the Animus River. He says that his project acknowledges the “immediate urgency of sane and equitable responses to rapid ecological change.”
The installation was commissioned by the University of Denver’s Vicki Myhren Gallery as part of an exhibition on climate change and the environment. You can listen to a snippet of the sounds created by Animas below.
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