800 Radios Tower Over You in Overwhelming Installation Artwork

A collection of 800 radios — Bakelite, vintage, Art Deco, retro plastic — gather around a metal frame to form a tower some three metres tall. Large, old radios line the bottom of the tower; smaller, newer radios congregate towards the upper tiers of the tower, making it appear even taller. All of the radios are switched on and tuned to different networks. Voices, music, and radio pops and hisses blaze like a roaring fire. In a dark-lit room at the Tate Modern, you are immersed in a sonic sensory overload. This is Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles’s 2001 installation Babel. <h1>The installation references a story from The Book of Genesis</h1> The story is a myth about The Tower of Babel and it goes like this. A little while after the great flood, the inhabitants of the land of Shinar built a tower that could reach the heavens. Discovering the tower, God was angry and scrambled the languages of the tower’s creators so that they could no longer understand one another — and that’s why people speak different languages. Meireles’s installation Babel is named after this story. The radios are tuned to different networks around the world, and consequently, sound in different languages. <a href="https://medium.com/contemporary-sound-art/800-radios-tower-over-you-in-overwhelming-installation-artwork-e5b3bec220b6">Website</a>