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Installations

Introduction

Sound Art has a difficult time in gallery spaces, partly because of the significant ambient sound that usually fills an art gallery. Sound Art is also a relatively new phenomenon in the art world in general, and visitors often give little time to discovering the experiences being offered them in a Sound Art installation. Unlike a painting or sculpture, which may at least be glanced at, Sound Art requires some investment of time — often just to discern that it even exists. Some of my most fascinating work (to me, at least) requires listening closely in a very silent environment.

Because of these presentation issues, I have divided my installation work into two main areas — gallery installations and custom venue "performances." The former are designed to stand up reasonably well in a somewhat noisy and active art gallery environment, while the latter are principally pure sound, composed specifically for an acoustic environment that must fulfill specific spatial and acoustic requirements.

Physical Installations

Timbre Diagonal

Timbre Diagonal was my first Sound Art installation piece in a gallery setting. It comprised a two-channel composition presented through a pair of speakers positioned at opposite corners of a room about 20 feet square. A dummy speaker (a walnut veneer museum display column) was located in the third corner with a small light sculpture sitting on it. The fourth corner was the location of the door.

The extreme positioning of the speakers, and the complete absence of blending or "cross-talk" between the two channels, contributed to a clear experience of directionality. This was an expression of my emergent understanding of the importance of directionality in maintaining the integrity of subtle timbral "voices." When non-referential timbres are mixed in the audio chain, before emerging from speakers, they produce a new timbre, not a pair of co-existing timbres. Once mixed, it is impossible to discern them as more than one timbre unless they are of very distinct texture to begin with.

But when spatial separation is preserved — that is, when the two timbres are mixed only in the acoustic field of the room, the gallery visitor can easily tell them apart by their directionality, even if their tone and texture are quite similar. In fact, it is the subtle manipulation of tone and texture that makes such a composition interesting, and this kind of timbral orchestration or expression is very nearly impossible without maintaining significant spatial separation among two or more sound sources.

Unfortunately, no photos of the installation survive, other than the light sculpture mentioned above.


Photos from J-71

Photos from J-71 was a visual-narrative installation based on a whimsical notion that somehow in the mid-1800's a set of full-color Holmes Stereoscope cards had been brought back from a trip to someplace called "J-71" by an adventurous Victorian gentleman. Some of the cards were enlarged, and their images reversed so that viewers could see the full 3D effect by gently crossing their eyes. The other cards were provided in protective laminated form for viewing in a replica of a Holmes Stereoscope. The notes of the putative adventurer were excerpted on display panels so that viewers could place each image in the context of a traveler of that period naively observing ancient ruins containing fragments of lost technology unlikely ever to have been found on Earth.

The entire set of Holmes cards, with accompanying commentary, can be found here. The images are presented switched left to right so that intrepid visitors may view them in full high-resolution 3D by the "gently cross-eyed" technique.


Ashtangakasha

Ashtangakasha description.


Four Speakers

Four Speakers description.


Water / Fire

Water / Fire description.

Custom Venue Installations

Eight-Channel Timbre Hall

The custom venue project is not a sound installation in a gallery — it is a gallery, designed specifically for the presentation of my 8-channel timbre orchestrations (and other types of Sound Art, of course).

Sound-Only Installations

Over the last few years I have created a few sound pieces for physical installations by other artists.

Sixties Soup

Sixties Soup was an audio accompaniment piece for an installation by Tom Lasota, who works in day-glo paints and ultra-violet light, inspired explicitly by the psychedelic art of the 1960's. My work was essentially a pair of mashup recordings: "Sixties Soup" (60:00) and "99 in 33" (33:00). The first piece is a semi-abstract sound collage of music from the period overlaid with various atmospheric documentary soundtrack simulations. The second piece is a mashup of 99 brief slices of rock and jazz pieces from the period cross-faded over 33 minutes.

Although Sixties Soup wasn't really a sound-art installation in its own right, its development and presentation in a gallery venue influenced my subsequent work, and the two pieces are of interest as sound experiments. "99 in 33" was constructed by precisely mixing each music clip over a ten-second fade-in, ten seconds of normal volume, and a ten-second fade-out. At any given moment, one channel or the other is playing a segment at normal volume, but at all times a second segment is fading out and a third is fading in. The effect is not unlike wandering the halls of a college dorm in 1967. "Sixties Soup" is an interesting mind-trip, especially when played through headphones or a large sound system. "99 in 33" is somewhat listenable, and makes for an interesting ambience when played at low levels on speakers. These tracks can be downloaded here.


Stairs to the Emerald Gallery

Stairs to the Emerald Gallery was an installation in the long stairway to an upstairs art gallery showing a collection of paintings and drawings in a "celestial" theme. A long staircase led from the street-level door to a narrow hallway almost two stories above the ground. The hall opened into a large central gallery space, and the trip up from the street became the focus of my installation. The curator, Stacey Hurlin, had a specific plan for the stairway, so my sound work was hidden behind cloth drapes. Six pieces were composed for playback on six discrete channels, starting with chaos at street level, and ending with celestial sounds at the entrance to the gallery. These tracks, although not designed to be "listened to," are nevertheless of some interest as a kind of "program music" and have been remixed as individual stereo tracks. They can be downloaded here.