Troika’s ‘Electroprobe Installations’ is a series of site-specific installations which incorporate an assemblage of local electronic and electric objects alongside a magnetic microphone called the Electroprobe. The microphone imbues the inanimate with life by ‘listening’ to the otherwise inaudible, internal sounds of its surrounding objects.
The ‘Electroprobe’ is a device for listening in on our electronic surroundings: electric murmurs, magnetic hums and inaudible whistles. Originally part of a group of objects termed the Subjective Tool Series, which began in 2003 with the ‘SMS Guerrilla Projector’, the ‘Electroprobe’ is an attempt to subvert the inherently rational, objective nature of tools and everyday commodities by affording them a seemingly emotional, autonomous life.
The fourth in the series, ‘Electroprobe Installation #4, Still Life With Timer’, a chaotic assemblage of items including a desk light, large clock, a Hulger phone, polaroid camera, a record player and a laptop computer, was commissioned by the Contemporary Art Society and installed in 2010 at Deloitte HQ, Luxembourg as part of group exhibition 'Outer Worlds'.
Subverting the ‘still life’ archetype, ‘Electroprobe Installation #4, Still Life With Timer’, becomes the perfect vehicle for an alternative taxonomy of objects, in which spatial organisation follows a different principle - that of arranging objects in relation to their electromagnetic tunes. The various objects manifest as an electronic ‘orchestra’ which the viewer is able to hear with the use of the ‘Electroprobe’ ; symphonies and dialogues between otherwise inanimate and inaudible objects, become audible through headphones.