242 Telephone speakers, wire, sound piece,
amplifier
8’ x 8’ x 1”
2003
“The title of this piece evokes a sound-making mechanism to tune human beings and put them in harmony with one another on a global scale. Gertrude Stein’s novella Many Many Women provides the script for this sound sculpture, which consists of 242 telephone speakers—one for every country or territory in the world—wired together for form endless loops of transmission. The speakers broadcast Stein’s mantra-like text “anyone having been that one is the one that one is.” Three different recordings circulate. The first is of Stein’s original text read in English. The second was created using software to translate the text successively into the languages of the countries involved in World War I and World War II, and finally back into English, incorporating the resulting distortions. The third version of the recording relays the text through the current year’s most prevalent languages from English to Chinese to Spanish to Arabic to Portugese to Japanese and back to English. Terry Berlier’s piece frees Stein’s words from their preserve on the printed page, affirming that hers is a living language, meant to be spoken, heard, repeated and reconfigured endlessly in new contexts.” —Tirza Latimer
