Matteo Vettorello: Tuning Space

In English, tuning refers to musical instruments, but also to devices of various kinds, such as the radio. Tuning also has a figurative meaning: being in tune with someone means being on the same wavelength.

Each of these meanings has some relation to tuning space. The work is a site-specific tuner. Two people coordinate their vocals using microphones outside the gallery. Depending on their ability to synchronise their inspiration and exhalation, they operate a winch connected to two flashing lights. The variations in the lights express the different conditions in which the gallery is located: a flashing red light indicates that the place is lonely, stressed, a blue light that interaction has taken place. The voice tunes the space like a musical instrument and the sculpture measures how much we are in tune with someone.

Matteo Vettorello (Venice, 1986) works on devices capable of quantifying incalculable elements of people’s moods in relation to places, the degree of harmony achieved between the users, the emotion expressed by a space. The series of Neighbourhood Wellbeing Detectors (R.B.V.O.T.L.), of which Tuning space is also a part, consists of sculptures that, when put into operation, become “the medium for activating a process of synergy between people, becoming itself a ritual space for foster the connection between individuals and the environment’.