Christian Marclay: Sound Stories

Marclay fuses art and technology to draw on the sounds and images of life on Snapchat

In Sound Stories, American artist and composer Christian Marclay (born 1955) fuses art and technology, using Snapchat videos as raw material. Featuring texts by Max Maxwell, this book documents the collaboration between the artist and Snapchat in an innovative project mixing the sounds and images of everyday life found on the multimedia messaging app, aggregating unattributed stories. Using algorithms created by a team of engineers at Snap Inc., Marclay experiments with millions of publicly posted Snapchat videos to create five immersive audiovisual installations, two of which are interactive. The Organ, a five-octave keyboard and its bench, allows the spectators to trigger video segments and their matched sounds onto the wall. Rooted in a sampling aesthetic fundamental to Marclay’s work, these installations respond to the storytelling available on Snapchat and visitors’ sounds and movements in the gallery space.