Lenka Morávková

Interactive Art Installation · Glass · Participatory Sound Environment

2013

PROJECT INFORMATION

This Is Not a Really Pleasant Sound is an interactive sound installation rooted in the decline of the glass manufacturing industry and its social consequences in Northern Bohemia, Czech Republic.

The work developed from Morávková’s ongoing artistic and ethnographic research into the region’s glassmaking industry, and from the tension between the seductive beauty of glass and the harsh conditions and sounds of its industrial production.

As many local glass factories were closing in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Morávková acquired more than 20,000 premium-quality Czech glass beads originating from the industry. Suspended as monumental glass curtains, they became both the physical material of the installation and a representation of the craftsmanship, labour and knowledge embedded in the region’s glassmaking tradition.

The installation transforms this material and the industrial sounds associated with its production into a participatory environment in which cooperation — and its failure — becomes part of the work itself.

HOW THE INSTALLATION WORKS

Visitors enter a shimmering environment formed by suspended curtains of thousands of glass beads. The installation is structured as a square, with different areas functioning as elements of a collective sound instrument.

Movement along opposing sides activates different pitches derived from the sound of glass grinding. Multiple visitors can play the installation simultaneously: their sounds can harmonize, collide, or cancel each other out. To shape the sonic environment intentionally, participants have to listen to one another, adjust their movements and negotiate their presence within the shared space.

At the centre, the sonic material shifts from pitched grinding sounds to field recordings and fragments of everyday conversations recorded inside glass factories, bringing the voices and social environment of glass production directly into the installation.

This collective interaction becomes a metaphor for the wider history addressed by the work. Harmony depends on listening, mutual awareness and cooperation; without them, the system can become fragmented or self-defeating. Morávková’s earlier ethnographic research into the regional glass industry documented how local production technologies and know-how were sold and transferred to manufacturers in China and other parts of Asia, contributing to the erosion of the competitive position of the very industry in which that knowledge had been developed.

The installation reflects this paradox: individual gain can weaken the system on which everyone depends. Visitors can cooperate and create harmony, or interfere with and cancel one another — turning the sonic interaction into a metaphor for cooperation, responsibility and the consequences of fragmented interests.

The seductive, almost luxurious appearance of the glass therefore stands in deliberate contrast to its abrasive industrial soundscape. Visitors do not simply observe the work: they collectively play — and negotiate — the system behind it.