Concord
Sound and light installation, 2009
on the ten-stringed lyre I will make music to you
Psalm 144:9
Concord is a transmitter of harmonious proportions that makes matter and the space around it oscillate. Harmony was known already to the ancient civilizations; written evidence of sound relations and string tuning can be found in Sumerian cuneiform U.3011, CBS 10996 (about 3500 BC). By proportioning the length of a string (space) with the pitch of a sound (vibration frequency), Pythagoras (580–500 BC) summarized the most ancient knowledge and systematized a doctrine of interval proportions expressed by correlations of natural numbers (2:1, 3:2, 4:3, 5:4) and postulated that harmony describes the cyclical oscillations in the very foundations of the universe and cosmological causation.
The international economic, social and financial processes in the world can be viewed in the light of chaos theory as a system where the so-called butterfly effect is valid. Meteorologist Edward Lorenz has described it as an unpredictable and seemingly accidental situation where even the slightest changes in the initial conditions can cause dramatic changes and completely irregular system operation – under certain circumstances a flap of a butterfly’s wings at one end of the world can cause a tornado at the other. Involving acceleration and instability in these processes you can easily picture the butterfly effect by recalling the recent swift changes in the global financial markets and their repercussions in other fields.
The sound of Concord is created by a network of self-resonating strings arranged in a space. The strain of the strings and the corresponding pitch of sound create a certain musical succession, the total of which is a harmonious chord. The proportions arranged into a united group are an antithesis to chaos, they balance out the world that is torn by dynamic complexity and do that by juxtaposing the correlation of natural numbers to the exponentially uncontrollable equations.