ANRI SALA
Tirana, Albania, 1974

All of a Tremble (Encounter I), 2017
Modified roll of vintage wallpaper, steel comb, pencil drawing on wallpaper, electric motor and movement software
350 x 1,166 x 23 cm
Acquired in 2019

This installation incorporates a wealth of historical references. It consists of a custom-built music box that quite literally plays the patterns printed on two rolls of wallpaper arranged on a wall reminiscent of a projection screen.

The device was created by combining two halves of cylinders originally used for printing wallpaper. The embossed designs now activate the teeth of a musical comb. In this way, the wallpaper patterns become a musical score played by the music box, with the cylinder functioning as a sound recording device, echoing the use of wax cylinders by Thomas Edison in 1877 to record and reproduce sound using the phonograph.

The work’s title, All of a Tremble, is taken from the first words uttered by a synthetic voice — the successful result of experiments by E.A. Humphries, a British acoustic engineer active in the early 1930s.

Sala’s interest in reinterpreting something originally conceived as decorative and secondary also points to the role of “ambient music” in our lives. French composer Erik Satie once referred to “furniture music” — sounds that our ears register but that we do not actively listen to.

The second part of the title, Encounter, refers both to the juxtaposition of two unrelated wallpaper patterns and to the close alignment between sound and image. In a way, the wallpaper in this work gives physical form to sound — an artistic medium that is, by nature, immaterial.