Cuckoo Radio, Caged Songs Sung (Tick Tock Tick) by Ven Voisey — created for the City of Pittsfield’s 2008/9 Artscape exhibition :: November 29, 2008 – September 2009 :: Opening: November 29; 4:00 – 6:00 pm :: Ferrin Gallery, 437 North Street, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

A clock: twelve cages sing twelve songs for twelve hours of the day. A flock: which has temporarily gathered up high on a lamp post, as birds are wont to do, and every hour, on the hour, they sing a song. These songs, composed of recorded bird calls and simple synthesized tones, are warnings, expressions of joy, crooning love songs, mating calls, questions, frustrated cries… Simultaneously they’re mysterious offerings and homages to the wind, the air, and to the things that slip through the rungs of a cage.

Cuckoo, that’s nonsense. Language is complicated. As time passes, it seems to gain complexity: meanings, associations, uses and misuses all accrue. The twelve songs that play over the course of the day through the speakers in the cages are written as a manner of disassembling and reformatting language. The arrangement of their tones are based on patterns of Morse-code-translations of words whose use I have found to be so complex and diluted that meaning is often lost or taken for granted.

These coded words share many qualities with bird songs: both being tonal, chirping languages which, without a means of translation, can only be recognized as skeletal structures; only hinting at content through their ability to contain. But even when a translation occurs, by nature of design, so many other things pass through rungs, and meaning happens somewhere in the wind, through the wires.

This machine is best explained in a connect-the-dots fashion:

sing song—bird song—12 eggs makes a dozen—a coded message—transmission—distress call—beep beep beep—12 tones makes an equal temperament—tweet tweet tweet—language—like, um, totally—(secret) well, not so much—meaning just this, this is what I’m saying—blah blah blah—visceral—nuance—what?—tick tick tick—12 numbers make the face of a clock—moment—ding—cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo