Caja de música
2003-2004

[play video]

Excerpt from a conversation between Jorge Macchi and Gabriela Salgado, 2006

GS: Jorge, in Caja de música (Music Box), a video piece of 2003/2004, you used a special device to connect image and sound: the generation of music by a mechanism that detected the entrance of cars in the video frame. That image reminded me of the views of Avenida Figueroa Alcorta behind the Museum of Fine Art in Buenos Aires, from the footpath bridge that crosses the six lane avenue. If you stand there,
a kind of ballet mécanique of cars seems to slide down the lanes at different speeds. How did the interplay of image and sound work in that piece?

JM: It was exactly at that particular location that I shot the image. I could have employed software to make it, but instead I used a manual method: I built a timetable that determined the exact moment in which each car entered the frame from the upper edge of the screen and I matched the entry of the cars with the sound. The pitch of each sound depends on the position that each car holds in relation to the lane markings on the street, as if they were the lines in a music score. In that manner I worked within a range between low D and high G (eleven
notes). After that I edited the image and the sound. In this work the idea of loop is very important. The group of cars that travel through the screen during the minute-long video are always the same, as if the cars were the protuberances of the cylinder in a music box.