Axehole

Visitors who find their way to Tingrith Fishery in Bedfordshire, southern England, will find that amongst the fishermen, Julie Freeman has stealthily installed a gallery, housed in a 20ft-high converted cylindrical silo.

The exhibition called The Lake demonstrates how artists are collaborating with the makers of ground-breaking technologies to create digital art.

Sixteen fish from the lake, an equal number of tench, rudd, goldfish and carp, were slit open, under anaesthesia, and miniature bio-acoustic tags are inserted into their bodies. The fish are then stitched up, woken up and returned to the lake where they emit a tiny acoustic signal every two seconds.

Within the lake are a number of hydrophones (underwater microphones) which pick up the emissions from the fish tags and feed that information into a laptop hidden nearby that works out the co-ordinates of each fish.

The other computer generates a soundscape, playing sound samples recorded in the environment that Freeman has matched to seven different types of movement or behaviour patterns of the fish.

Source: Hi-tech fish make their own music