sound crystals / -H

I have been working on this new installation/project as part of Leaning Out of Windows and finally I finished all the maple resonators and finalized the audio material. It will be presented January 25- February 8,  2018 at the ECUAD new building.

Leaning Out of Windows (LOoW) is a four-year SSHRCC funded interdisciplinary art and science project, involving four phases between 2016 to 2020. It involves co-designing, curating, testing, and analyzing models of collaboration for art and science. Participants include Emily Carr University’s faculty, art students, visiting artists + physicists, post-doctoral researchers and graduate students working at TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics and accelerator-based science located at the University of British Columbia.

 

In this venture we join together artists and physicists to share the quest to understand the nature of reality. Their diverse experiences, views, and interactions bring each discipline to see a new perspective on the creative process while also broadening the potential for communication between disciplines. Our aim is to transform the grammar of abstract knowledge by specifically addressing the barely discernible phenomena studied by physics through aesthetics, analogy, metaphor, and other inventive methods.

Resonances and Reveries

During the time spent working on Sound Crystals / -H I have been trying to maintain an approach that, while mainly focusing on sonic imagination, would explore the possibility of dialogue, relation and transference between visceral and intellectual knowledge. This is the trait of a behavior which main goal is to attain an intense creative flow and a reinforcement of the balance between creative energy, intuition and veridical perspectival content of hearing.

Approaching the dialogue with physicist Art Olin, and in general in the context of LOoW, I had the opportunity to better observe what is that I am doing when consciously activating poietic and symbolic analogies. In hearing and listening to the scientists at the TRIUMF seminar and to Art Olin’s elucidations during our conversations, I found myself asking very simple questions again and again: What is it? What am I hearing? And also: How does this hearing allow me to dialogue in the very space that is defined? What “knowledge transference” is about when inscribed in and inspired by a process of artistic transformation?

These very questions are also already an inscription, a giving form: a kind of writing immanent to the act of perception itself, though here sound is no an object, “a thing”, as I don’t rely in any reification of sonic phenomena. Everything here exists instead in a constant and complex negotiation in between a perceived presence and the perceiving subject: antihydrogen and my own apprehension of the traces of its possible, revealed, yet impenetrable existence. The in between of this binary oscillation is the contingency of our temporal and cultural framework (medium) and it is here where the creation of “a” sense (meaning?) between signifier and signified may eventually happen. This in between is a fluid, shifting, morphing and never firm relational transformation, activated by and within the constant flow and emergence of symbolic and poietic reveries. Or maybe it is just the creation of an aura, a distance, or something similar to a phantasmagoria: an effort to combine scientific and esoteric knowledge within an artistic behavior and a spectacular practice.

Finally, the contingency of an object (the installation itself) is the ephemeral metaphor of this interaction, a crystallized resonance of the anthropomorphic quality of our perception. Here I wish to play, and let everyone playing while being resounding within symbolic and analogical suggestions. Here it is also the very limit of my own comprehension of the world, though, as such, the embodied form of this resounding relationship shouldn’t be transformed in a neo-anthropocentric view, where we may think we have a distinct, “real” or privileged understanding of the world. That would be a heroic and sentimental view that has only led to catastrophic consequences and ideological fallacies. (GM)

Radicalizing: listening is attention, not apprehension; to listen is evidence of what happens as sound, not knowledge of what happens with sound. So: sound is the presence of an absolute, his annunciation is its own revelation, listening then certainly is not the act by which you come to a discursive apprehension, but the moment at which perception mediates and joins the multiplicity in the unity of formal knowledge. Listening is immediate experience in which knowledge coincides with the action: listening is ascesis.

(Franco Donatoni)

Thank you to RANDY LEE CUTLER + INGRID KOENIG

for inviting me to be part of this exciting research project,

and to Art Olin for his elucidations and fascinating work at TRIUMF