Deus Cantando by Peter Ablinger is a piano installation produced and composed for the Wien Modern Festival and the World Venice Forum 2009. It is not a digital piano, but a normal acoustic piano, where each key is played by a computer. The interesting thing about it is that by pressing multiple keys at the right time, the piano sounds come out as speech.
The text read out is the Declaration of the International Environmental Criminal Court by Adolfo Perez Esquivel and The XIV Dalai Lama.
We declare that we are all responsible educators, politicians, social organisations, trade unions, churches for saving and protecting our mother earth and we proclaim that another world is possible. In future our mother earth won’t have to live through foreseeable tragedies such as Bhopal, Chernobyl or the destruction of ecosystems as has occurred in many too many marine disasters caused by irregular oil tankers. Whoever has caused intentionally environmental disasters shall be judged by the international environmental criminal court in order to provide a concrete protection of the environment by effective proportional and dissuasive sanctions.
Note about the Declaration
It’s worth pointing out that I couldn’t find anything about this text outside of this performance. The “International Environmental Criminal Court” is also a fictional court and does not currently exist.
The video below also shows some behind the scenes footage.
And here’s the score in case you want to try this at home!
via Kottke.org