Interactive Sound Installation at:
CCNOA (Centre for Contemporary Non-Objective Art)
Earwitness Sound Art Series
Brussels January 2005
Over the last months I have been collecting sounds and video images related to the circular movements of a lighthouse loom. What Virginia Woolf called the "winking eye" has provided me with a form that can be shared between both sound and image and related to human movements. Functioning as a spatial score the pulsating circularity is potentially infinite but not soporific.
The invitation to create a sound installation for Earwitness has given me the opportunity to exhibit my collection of circles, as overlapping miniatures, without the layer of video images that made up the recent performance Light Phase. It seems to me a paradox that these circular sounds contain more reference to images in their own right than when displayed with the images that inspired them. I am becoming curious as to the relations between sound and image through subtraction rather than combination or translation.
Images shadow the four distinct sonic elements, electronic, instrumental, environmental and vocal. Light sensors allow for subtle transformations of the sounds and can be influenced by visitors. Together these spiralling, folding patterns envelop the visitor while suggesting movement through distance and open space.
A Collection of Circles therefore has an alternative title, Pharology, the study of lighthouses.
performance for video, voice, sound and sensors:
Video Dance Festival, International Film Festival Thessaloniki Greece 2005
Light Phase was the first in the Light-House series. As a 30 minute single screen video performance with live sound, I explored the various motions implied by a light-house loom, applied to the camera work, the phasing of the sounds, and the internal motions of the shots. Regularly the camera spins in full circles across horizon lines of city-scapes and sea, and the surface water of both inland rivers and coastal shots. I filmed the material in Bretagne France, Maastricht Netherlands, and Mallorca Spain. The sounds I used were collected on location as well as composed out of instrumental material from the Banda piece and on top of this was my live voice speaking about centrifugal and centripetal forces of rotation which was distorted and transformed by electronics to blend into the fabric of the soundscape. The basis of the transformation between sound and light was two light sensors, placed on the video projection area: with the change in light intensity of the moving images, the sensors would control shifting sound patterns acting as the continual sonic thread throughout the piece.
Sound, sensors, video installation
Studio 219, Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht
27 - 30 September 2005
The acoustics of a reverberant chamber force the sound into a liquid behaviour. If these sounds could be seen travelling through space, leaving from a distinct source and location, dispersing, reverberating, would we understand more clearly what it may be like to set off these resonations? The sound is placed by a musician in the space, it's set-off, set in motion. The next sound may be set in motion before the other dies, relating each sound to one another through the resonating acoustics of the space. The echoes off one wall compared to another may make the liquid sound interfere, perhaps mix, perhaps separate or curdle. Perhaps we can ferment these sounds in their space, bottle them up and let them mature, so after their process of transformation they become intoxicating...