BETWEEN | YOU | AND | ME is a wall of sound and light. Like any other wall, it defines an architectural space, just it can be perceived only when the visitor comes close and interacts with it. Two thin membranes of light form a visible frame filled with sound. Extremely vectored hypersonic speakers make the textures of broken glass audible: a sound architecture within the wall, comprising six juxtaposed single sound beams, whose arrangement changes depending on the visitor’s position. Observed from a distance, the wall fades away: clear transparency and only faintly resonant tones attest to its non-existence.

Unlike walls of stone or concrete and intangible barriers of the social, national or political variety, the boundary in this installation can be overcome. The installation invites the visitor to play with seemingly two-dimensional membranes of light, to transgress them with his or her whole body or its individual parts, to observe their body being dissected by light, immersed in the walls, and thereby to perceive it as discrete from other bodies. 

Acoustically, the wall consists of glass; all the sound material was recorded by the artist herself. She systematically cut Christmas tree balls with an axe, as well as mirrors and the complete stock of glasses from a former restaurant. Using three directional microphones, she recorded the breaking, fall and impact of the glass on the ground and arranged the sounds into a six-channel composition.

The inspiration behind Anke Eckardt’s installation was to shape sound literally, as sculpture. The hypersonic speakers in this installation have an unnatural radiation angle of just three degrees and use ultrasound at 100 kHz as the frequency for the ultimate signal. The technology was originally developed by the military for psychological warfare. The police use it internationally as a means of crowd control, for example at demonstrations in Senegal in 2012.


Links: www.ankeeckardt.org

Concept/Realization: Anke Eckardt; composition: Anke Eckardt & Henry Koch; programming: Yvan Volochine; technical support: Zolle.
Thanks to: Peter Votava, Douglas Henderson; realized by means of The Artist-in-Residence grant of the Saxon State Ministry for Higher
Education, Research and the Fine Arts 2011 which is awarded in cooperation with City of Dresden and co-funded by Culture Programme
(2007–2013) in framework of European networking- and cooperation project ECAS – Networking Tomorrow's Art For An Unknown Future.

**Anke Eckardt** (DE), born in 1976, is a sound and media artist. Since 2008 her work has included sculptures, installations and a theoretical discourse on the topic of the phenomenology of sounds. For her sculptures and installations she uses sound (including ultrasound and infrasound) in combination with other media/materials such as moving light and water to build large-scale works of a rich metaphoric radiance. It is essential for Eckardt’s work that the technically complex ensembles appear deceptively simple—in this way they can directly trigger the imagination of the audience.