Aaro_Murphy teoskuva
Visual artist Aaro Murphy works across media such as sound, video and smell. He creates time-based sculptures and installations that question the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, the organic and the synthetic. The multimedia installation Volatile Score is a self-operating air and sound instrument. Murphy visited smell laboratories and recorded sound for the work during a research residency in Tokyo.

The installation consists of a series of glass and metal flutes that are coded to sound together using a computer-coded pneumatic air system. Shifting between robotic entities and scientific instruments, the sculptures begin to play and operate seemingly in their own time frame. Gentle bursts of air merge together with field recordings of transit networks, machines and human voice, with a constant attempt to communicate.

Aaro Murphy developed a large part of the work during the Tokyo Art & Science Research Residency in 2022, organised by Bioart Society, Finnish Insitute in Japan and BioClub Tokyo. The work expands Murphy’s research of machine olfaction and air technologies into material form, creating a phantasmagoria of self-operating machines. The project also extends Murphy’s previous material exploration with glass and metal into a larger-scale architectural form.

The sound for the work was composed by Duncan Robertson, and the coding was done by Marcel Smit.

 

The project is kindly supported by:

Finnish Art Society (Young Artist Grant)

The Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux

 

aaromurphy.com