Congregation is a word I usually associate with Christianity: the congregation go to the church to celebrate mass. This was a different sort of congregation: a coming together of people carrying metallic balls through the streets of Macau.
Sound artist, Ray Lee, has created these metallic spheres which have some special properties: they make electronic sounds such as beeps and drones as you walk with them.
A group of about 15 of us were each assigned a ball and told to walk with it and be sensitive to the sounds it produces. As we made our way around the park it did indeed come to life and start humming.
The sounds were sometimes harmonic and other times abrasive, as if it were indicating which direction it wanted to be carried in. Following the path of greatest harmony was the basic idea, then, and we fanned out following a similar direction but not identical streets.
There had been heavy rain earlier in the afternoon and the streets were washed clean and less busy than usual. Without knowing exactly where the ball was leading me, I did get a sense all the same that I was progressing on some sort of path. The sounds that the ball produced slowly evolved and became rhythmic.
While we are used to using online mapping software to make our way around the city there is something unusual in being guided by a non-human entity in this way. It is more opaque. There is a moment where you ask yourself whether it really knows where it is taking you, and if knows isn't the right word for a machine, then is competent at this task is perhaps a more precise way of putting it.
We were lead up winding steps to the old fortress in the centre of the city. Slowly the balls congregated and they produced new sounds. They harmonised with one another and a little extra bass frequency was added with a speaker stationed up there.
The spheres were then collected and displayed on a set of stands. There was a funny air of this being both an art event and a technical display. It reminded me of the way the two of these used to come together in the fairs of old where new inventions were staged to maximum effect. This is not to belittle the artistic aspect of the work, it comes more from the self-effacing manner of the artist and staff presenting Congregation. The centre of attention was clearly the balls themselves and not the people.
The tour that this produced had to walk a fine line between being challenging enough that it wasn't so simple to complete that it was over before it started, whilst at the same time not being so hard that people lost their way, never finding the destination. You needed to be sensitive to both the ball and your location and let them take you on a magical mystery tour. My sense is, it managed to strike a good mid-point. While the technology required to achieve this isn't completely cutting edge, it is complex enough that it would be easy to get things wrong. This looked like a well-designed system that had been tested in the field and worked smoothly so, as an audience, you didn't have to worry about the technology but could instead relax into the experience.
