Today was installation day. We began by collecting the Bela Mini, all ready programmed with my sound files, from Tom’s house. Once in Hertford, my team (Ben, Sam and Barbara) helped me to carry the sculptures from my studio all the way around the corner to Courtyard Arts (50 yards)…

and once we had curated the space, with technician Christopher helping me to suspend one of the sculptures from the ceiling, the job of sorting, connecting and taping down all the electrical wires began.

There are now yards and yards of wires going all around the edges of the gallery, with some crossing the floor when we needed a short cut.

This was the point when Tom Fox was to have arrived to connect everything to the Bela Mini and adjust the volumes and balance between the voices using a (very complicated) coding system on his laptop. However, he came down with a high fever yesterday so wasn’t up to doing anything, let alone driving to Hertford. He had gamely written out a long and clear list of instructions for us to do our own coding. But everything went pear-shaped before we even got that far: we couldn’t get any sounds out of the system at all. We didn’t just have non-adjusted sounds, we had NO sounds. This was problematic.

The next two hours were spent remote-troubleshooting over WhatsApp with a long-suffering and endlessly resourceful Tom. Take the SD card out, unplug this, reconnect that, take all the wires out, swap this over, reboot that.

Nothing. There should have been a flashing blue light emanating from the Bela Mini, but it was troublingly constant. We sent many photos to Tom of what we were seeing, then would carry out the next set of instructions…

until there were wires and plugs everywhere.

In the end, with Tom never having experienced anything like this before with Bela, we decided to take it back to him so that he can wipe the memory tonight and start reprogramming it. And instead of balanced sounds, it will simply have a volume knob so that all of the sounds together can be either louder or quieter (damage limitation – we won’t have to do any complicated coding tomorrow). At the moment, I will be grateful if there are any sounds at all.

I just got on with doing a few small remaining jobs on the sculptures (how easy it would be if this were just a sculpture exhibition):

Who knows what will happen tomorrow. I will pick up the Bela Mini from Tom and try it again. It’s a good exercise in just accepting what is. Sam says if the sculptures aren’t able to speak then it’s actually a fitting metaphor for voiceless beings everywhere.

Anyway, there will be sculptures and wires and wine and good company on Tuesday evening if nothing else. Hope to see you there!