ATARGATIS
“All things are drawn back to the sea, the source and the end of all.”
Ovid
myth-sonic installation. The library becomes an ocean. Light folds into blue. Voices surface and dissolve.
A forgotten myth breathes again.
Atargatis transforms the Fleet Library into a shifting underwater landscape of sound and color.
A 12 speaker array is woven through the stacks, carrying whispers, breath, and melodic fragments that move like currents.
The installation rebuilds one of the earliest mermaid stories; a myth fragmented across centuries - by letting sound drift, collide, and reform in the architecture.
Visitors wander through a living narrative that reveals itself differently each time it is heard.
Booklets available in the space offer the written retelling of her myth, allowing visitors to read the story as they listen, completing the installation’s dialogue between text and sound.
Celli: Thiago Wolf | Clarinets: Itay Dayan | Flutes: Amir Milstein | Guitars: Nadav Brenner | Violins, Mandolins, Moceño: Yuval Gur
The Music
The digital music version of Atargatis functions as a non-linear sound environment. Each playback begins differently, with all tracks starting at independent points, ensuring no two listening experiences are the same. A multichannel mixer allows listeners to navigate between layers, translating the act of wandering through the library into an interactive online form.
Creating Atargatis
The process of creating Atargatis grew from my thesis research on music as an environment. I approached the fragmented myth of Atargatis as a chronicle that needed to be rebuilt, and the Fleet Library became the natural site for a newly formed narrative. The work began by listening to the room itself. Its aisles, shelves, and long reflections behaved like an underwater landscape, so the composition emerged from the way sound naturally travels through the space. This shaped the two pitch ecologies that form the musical core. Each ecology has its own cluster of pitches and rhythmic behavior, and the two drift through one another without settling into stable harmony. Their instability mirrors the shifting nature of a chronicle reconstructed from fragments.
To support “performers” inside this environment, I created two graphic notation systems. The Breath Stones score presents pitches and dynamics as stones rising and dissolving across a sand field, with register and intensity encoded through shape, size, and opacity . The Wave Score expresses the second ecology as flowing lines that behave like currents, guiding the performer through changes in articulation, motion, and brightness as waves cross the play line . Both systems allow the performer to inhabit the environment rather than follow a fixed path.
Reading the story became another way of entering the space. Visitors hold a printed booklet and read the reconstructed chronicle while walking through the sound field. The act of reading inside the library, surrounded by moving pitches and shifting harmonies, turns the myth into something lived rather than narrated. The digital version continues this idea by reshuffling the starting points of all tracks so that each playback begins in a different state. The listener is always entering a world already in motion, just as the chronicle itself continues to rewrite and rearrange itself through sound, space, and presence.