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Jim
Lewis / Coordinator
Sound
collaboration with Stephen Moore
What’s
inside and outside? People call home from the
top of Mount Everest. They walk on the bottom
of the ocean. Let’s face it, we cover the
globe and treat it like our back room.
If
thought is creative, is interior different from
exterior because of time or because of space?
Or is it a question of outlook? The Kingdom
of God is within you, kiddo. As I was working
on this show, I looked to artists who play with
these themes. I wanted pieces that tweak the
boundaries, that would be perfectly acceptable
furniture yet equally at home in a gallery.
I wanted art that hits us where we live.
This
show dances the lines: Between installation
and décor; between outside and in; between
natural/environmental and domestic/ manufactured.
I’ve been making furniture for 33 years
now, it’s my nature. My work here is quirky
stuff, things I like to play with, expressive
rather than commercial.
I have a fascination with mathematics, geometry
in particular. What is it about those Platonic
solids that grabs me so? [Note: Theaetetus of
Athens was a student of Plato’s and the
creator of solid geometry. He was the first
to study and construct all five regular solids.
This work of his formed Book XIII of Euclid's
Elements.] The Greeks called math the calculus
(stone) because they played it with pebbles
in the dust. Very physical and oh so obvious.
Square numbers make a square array, 3 x 3. Rectangular
numbers make rectangles, 3 x 4, 4 x 5. As simple
as that.
That’s
where the 3-4-5 Table hits me, I feel it but
I can’t explain it. Take it apart, fiddle
around, put it together differently, play with
the patterns, play with the shapes. The
3 x 3 Chair— pure geometry, just the fundamentals.
Sit on it. Sound Table— As Below, So Above.
And you thought Alchemy 101 would never pay
off. All
these pieces are to be touched and felt, fondled,
used, loved, lived, and enjoyed. Or not. Go
for it.
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Stephan
Moore
Hex
Table is a collaboration between myself
and sculptor/furniture maker Jim Lewis. This
piece revisits and expands upon the sort of
audience interaction first explored in the
installation piece Maze Navigation.
Instead of a 16-channel speaker system, there
is now a 19-channel system arranged as a hexagon
of speakers hanging from the gallery ceiling.
The audience interacts with surface of a hexagonal
table that has a surface made up of 19 hexagonal
tiles. Contact microphones attached to the
underside of each tile detect transmitted
vibrations created by rolling an iron ball
around the surface of the table, or knocking
on the tiles. Layers of sound are generated
and brought to the foreground in the corresponding
overhead speakers. The level of the sounds
corresponds to the amount of disturbance detected.
The sounds used are recordings of various
naturally occurring sound events, such as
crowd noise, passing cars, choruses of insects
at night, all overlaid against a background
of light rain. The table encourages the user
to experiment with spatially composing a space,
using the table as an interface to amplify
their physical gestures, improvise a musical
idea, or generate an environmental atmosphere.
The
current speaker array system uses a Macintosh
laptop computer connected to a MOTU 828 MkII
audio interface. This is in turn connected
to an Alesis AI-3 audio interface via optical
cable. The contact microphones are connected
to the interfaces directly, and the interface
outputs connect to five four-channel Stewart
Audio amplifiers, which power the nineteen
speakers. All of the audio hardware fits inside
the base of the table, which is built from
a discarded industrial cable spool.
The
piece is installed as a part of a furniture-oriented
group show at the Fulton Street Gallery. I
considered it an appropriate challenge, constructive
to the collaborative process, to make this
piece as accessible as possible, creating
an environment that welcomed the presence
of other work and not dominating the space.
I approached the idea of "sound as decoration"
subversively, as the sounds produced are only
part of a background ambience so long
as one does not interact with them. As soon
as a participant discovers their control over
the soundscape, the sounds are pulled forward
from the background of the participant's aural
field, while other more-typically fore grounded
sounds are tuned out. The participant themselves
becomes the sound artist as decorator.
I have only designed a set of potentials for
them to explore.
The
content and interaction style of this piece
are influenced by my interest in the Acoustic
Ecology movement instigated by the work and
writings of R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp,
and others. Following on Katherine Norman's
idea that listening can itself be a material
for musical composition, this work (and others
that I have been making with the speaker arrays)
experiments with listening and concepts of
location, fore grounding sounds that normally
occupy our inattentional aural space, and
inviting participants to engage in a heightened
mode of listening, where ingrained expectations
of environmental sound can be exposed and
challenged.
http://www.oddnoise.com
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