Installation | Bill Parod & Teresa Parod: “The Elephants of Trianon”
The Elephants of Trianon is an augmented-reality audiovisual installation that extends a series of public murals into an interactive spatial sound environment. The original work consists of ten adjacent murals painted on garage doors in a public alley in Evanston, Illinois, USA. These form part of a larger international body of public work by the artist, Teresa Parod. For the International Computer Music Conference, the project is presented as a free-standing installation at TU Hamburg-Harburg using large construction-fence banners which approach the full-size of the garage door murals.
Using a custom mobile app, visitors’ devices recognize each mural and anchor a corresponding three-dimensional audiovisual scene in space. As visitors move through the installation and activate additional murals, their scenes accumulate and blend, creating a continuously evolving environment, rather than a sequence of isolated works. The installation therefore functions as a spatial composition shaped by listener movement, attention, and duration of engagement.
The soundscape combines field recordings made in Bali, New Orleans, and Chicago with instrumental layers and voices in ten languages. Animated three-dimensional forms—birds, bats, dogs, elephants, rabbits, and celestial figures—appear among the murals, along with subtle video textures and custom shaders that bring painted elements into motion. Some virtual elements are not confined to a single mural but move throughout the installation space, responding to the physical layout and dimensions of the exhibition environment.
The project suggests a scalable model for mobile, spatially responsive sound installations in galleries and public spaces. The software framework and mobile application used in The Elephants of Trianon have been developed through prior public installations and gallery presentations and are designed to function across a range of exhibition formats, from outdoor murals to indoor projection and free-standing display structures. The ICMC installation demonstrates how augmented reality can be used not only as a visual medium, but as a platform for spatial audio composition and listener-driven musical form.
About the artists
Bill Parod (b. 1954, Chicago USA) is a composer, improviser (violin), and software developer who works on interactive spatial music, audio poetry, image reactive augmented reality, and living music mobile apps. His work has appeared in Chicago at Elastic Arts, Experimental Sound Studio, and the Jay Pritzker Pavilion; Burning Man, Nevada USA; New York University NYC, and Ircam in Paris, France. My music is available as mobile apps in the Apple AppStore.
Teresa Parod (b. 1957, Alton IL, USA) paints vibrant, luminous oil paintings and murals, celebrating life through dichotomies such as light and shadow, warm and cool and complementary colors. Her landscapes invoke mythological destinations inviting the viewer to journey there.
She has created over one hundred works of public art in the United States, Cuba, Bali, Nepal, and Istanbul. In Cuba, she was honored to work with mosaicist José Fuster, whose work inspired her creation of art in unexpected and underused spaces.
She lives in Evanston, Il with her husband, Bill Parod. Together they have collaborated on several exhibitions and performances and multichannel visual and musical art.
She also teaches art history at Oakton college, does an annual century bike ride and studies and performs classic Indonesian dance.