Tate Modern
Babel 2001
This piece was the one that struck me the most when I looked inside the whole thing in Tate Modern, it is an oversized installation in the form of a circular tower where the artist Clido Meireles has stacked hundreds of second-hand analogue radios in layers. These radios are tuned to a number of different radio stations on the North Road and are tuned to minimal but audible audio for the human ear, they continuously produce a low continuous sound.
I went back to the source of the whole concept of this device and found that it came from the biblical concept of the ‘Tower of Babel’. In the Bible, the ‘Tower of Babel’ was a tower high enough to reach heaven, and the builders were mandated to use different languages so as not to offend the presence of God, which prevented them from communicating and led to division between the builders and became the origin of human conflict. I find it amazing and interesting to base a work on a religious concept like this, and maybe in the future I can try to use an abstract or legendary concept as inspiration for a work.