Noah Berrie: Antiphon

Antiphon (2026) is a five-part sound installation that transforms the Haus for Media Art Oldenburg into a single vibrating body.

The work of US-American artist Noah Berrie explores sound as inherently relational and material: co-produced between vibrating objects, architectural space, and the listener, and drawing on feedback, transduction, and tuning as compositional methods that let systems and environments speak on their own terms.

In the main hall, nine piano wires hang from the ceiling, held taut by lead weights and sustained through electromagnetic feedback, sifting through harmonics or falling silent according to the conditions of the room. One weight corresponds to the mass of the artist’s body; the others are tuned around it.

Downstairs, more than five hundred steel strings are plucked by motors transposing a gyroscopic recording of the North Sea. Wound bass strings line the walls between rooms, sounding softly through the building like bells. Subwoofers play recursive recordings of the building’s own resonance at frequencies felt in the chest and feet rather than heard. A dark room with sixteen speakers plays recordings of a string quintet transduced and refracted through steel, brass, and paper. Often holding a single note, other times dissolving into rich tonality, the piece slows time to carefully examine the inner life of a vibrating string.

An antiphon (from the Greek, “sounding against”) is a preparatory verse, a brief refrain that attunes the mind to receive what follows. This exhibition prepares a similar attention, sounding against the boundaries between self and surroundings, instrument and material, music and sound.

Rather than delivering a message or spectacle, ANTIPHON aims to evoke a specific quality of attention: a retuning of perception toward the immanent and imperceptible.

Noah Berrie was the 2025 grantee of the Media Art Grant from the Stiftung Niedersachsen at the Haus for Media Art Oldenburg.