Singing Cloud

In an age of dematerialised media, of the virtual and of immaterial data, the Indian artist Shilpa Gupta, who trained in sculpture at the Sir J. J. School of Art (Mumbai, India) between 1992 and 1997, reaffirms, not without humour and a certain irony, the value and necessity of the concrete object in her monumental work Singing Cloud (2009), presented in 2009 at the Laboratoire in Paris.

The “skin” of this suspended cloud is made up of an assemblage of 4,000 microphones from which sound elements emerge. Reacting to its environment, alternating sleep and sudden starts, this swarm turns into a polyphonic creature, a kind of gigantic fly’s eye from which, at certain moments, a multitude of voices, memories and languages emanate. We are therefore far from technological coldness and closest to the irrational. Technology is a medium, a material to be handled and arranged between sound, image and perception.

180 x 24 x 60 inches, 4000 black microphones, sound diffusion system, multitrack soundtrack (9’)