Amazing Grace is the most covered song ever written.

I had this idea around ‘grace filling the airwaves. What would it be like if as you flicked through the radio stations found grace on every channel? And I built a Max MSP app that mimicked clicking through radio stations and continued to play the song but by different artists.

As I was listening through some of the different recordings, I came across recordings of artists and celebrities that I immediately judged. One by a guy who had just been papped drunk spouting nonsense. I remember thinking: ‘You can’t sing Amazing Grace.’ This was followed immediately by the revelation of how ridiculous that thought was.

Can I understand what it is to look at others and say they are ‘like me’, or I like them? Exploring this I created a Quartz Composer video installation for a laptop. The participant sat at a lone laptop and it started playing the video below patching together different versions of Amazing Grace and then showing a gallery of ‘saints and sinners’ which then disappeared leaving only a video of the viewer. The idea is you found yourself among them. The video was on a 3-second delay (using the laptop webcam) which gave the impression you were viewing yourself in a slightly detached way.

Grace filling the airwaves:

The video file from the interactive installation: