Faltungen is a sound installation that uses the metaphor of the crane to explore processes of folding:
sound’s folding of our experience of place and time, as well as the power of the symbol to fold or transform ideas. First commissioned by the Kranich (Crane) Museum in Hessenburg, the installation weaves together post-World-War-II Japan and post-World-War-I Germany via American cinema with language games. In English, a crane can be either a long-necked bird or a longnecked lifting machine. In Japanese tradition one thousand origami cranes are folded to fulfill one’s wish. In film production, the “crane shot” is the swooping aerial view first invented for All Quiet on the Western Front (USA, 1930), a film about the horrors of World War I as seen through the eyes of young German soldiers. This innovative perspective was invented to evoke the shock and awe of a war without precedent: a new disembodied eye that floated free of gravity, with the power to stitch points in space and story. Graydon’s installation consists of two sound channels that fold together the audio from all the crane shots in the American movie with a semi-fictional story of a young woman who is folding a thousand paper cranes. As she works she recounts the events of her life, including past wishes articulated by folded cranes, and her own experiences with a strange Japanese translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 eponymous novel, which inspired her to travel to Germany and eventually become a translator herself.

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