The Great Animal Orchestra: Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists

The Great Animal Orchestra from United Visual Artists on Vimeo.

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The Great Animal Orchestra on view at The Peabody Essex Museum November 20, 2021 through May 22, 2022

The Peabody Essex Museum and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain are proud to present the North American premiere of The Great Animal Orchestra.

Step into an immersive audio-visual experience that celebrates our planet’s rich biodiversity. Over the course of nearly fifty years, Bernie Krause collected more than 5,000 hours of recordings of natural environments, including at least 15,000 terrestrial and marine species from around the world.

Trained as a musician, Krause found animal vocalizations in the natural world to be akin to musical harmony and orchestral organization. Krause’s soundscapes reveal that within any ecosystem, each species has its own acoustic niche and human activities are increasingly silencing these great animal orchestras. United Visual Artists (UVA) worked with Krause to visualize these recordings as animated spectrograms, which immerse us in the heart of these wild soundscapes. This unique installation makes a plea for preserving the wondrous diversity of the animal world.

The Great Animal Orchestra, a collaboration between Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists, was commissioned in 2016 by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, and is now part of its permanent collection. The exhibition is organized by the Peabody Essex Museum and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.

Lecture – Antarctica – PEM, Salem, MA – 6/28


You can attend my free lecture (sponsored by Canon) “Antarctica”, Saturday, June 28 from 3:15 to 4:15 pm at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA.
My lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibit Polar Attractions. In it, I’ll discuss my 2005 and 2007 voyages through the Antarctica Ocean to the Antarctic Peninsula. I’ll show several bodies of work. Antarctica represents my most directly representational work to date, designed to intensify the role of advocacy in my work, and will be presented along with useful facts assembled during my research of the area that highlight the uniqueness and global importance of the region. Following this, I’ll present Exhalation and Suffusion, two highly altered but related bodies of work that (like all of my work) challenge notions of singularity, remoteness, and stability. What do I mean? Come find out!
Read my Antarctica essays here.
See my Antarctica images here.
What do you think of my Antarctic work? Comment here!
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