Twelve hundred piano strings reach from floor to ceiling in Large String Array, transforming the Jack Straw New Media Gallery into an automatic resonant instrument that plays a story of life in a pandemic. An ensemble of twelve discrete voices reverberates throughout the room, each pulled directly from the windows, walls and wires of Cameron’s home while sheltered in place. Custom high-gain amplifiers and contact microphones were developed to listen in to faint transmissions of daily life. Large String Array reimagines this cloistered soundscape as a tone poem transfigured through steel wire.
The story of quarantine sounds out through the tension of home when it is both cage and privilege, a refuge coated with a thin membrane of isolation. The early eerie quiet of pandemic gives way to the protests against police violence and systemic racism — the whisper of social distance becomes the screams for social justice. The sounds of stillness and rage and pain join together in this meditation on isolation and solidarity.