Soundig arts / Art space III. The Time-based Art of Bill Fontana.
1/ SONIC DREAMSCAPES – MIAMI BEACH 2018
by Bill Fontana. 19:23. excerpt
This is an imaginary landscape made of environmental sounds and the images that they evoke. The presence of this sound sculpture is meant to create a space of fantasy out of the hidden soundscapes of Miami Beach. Sonic Dreamscapes is listening to and looking at the Miami Beach coast. It is an artistic response to the issues of rising sea levels. It is immersing Soundscape Park with deep underwater sounds while projecting the interactions of dynamic coastal waves with light. It is an immersive sonic and visual meditation designed to give the sea around Miami Beach a passionate voice that awakens a new awareness of the fundamental importance of the issues of climate change and rising sea levels.
2/ HARMONIC BRIDGE – TATE MODERN – 2006
by Bill Fontana. 25:01. excerpt
This sound sculpture will explore the musicality of sounds hidden within the structure of the London Millennium Foot Bridge. This bridge is alive with vibrations caused by the bridge’s responses to the collective energy of footsteps, load and wind. This sonic world is inaudible to the ear when walking over this bridge. It will be revealed by the use of the accelerometers (which are vibration sensors) that are listening to the inner dynamic motions of the bridge. Harmonic Bridge will be realized by installing a network of live accelerometers on different parts of the Bridge in order to acoustically map in real time its hidden musical life. The live sonic mapping will be translated into an acoustic sculpture by carefully rendering sounds from this listening network into a spatial matrix of loudspeakers. This sculpture will not only render the natural acoustic movements of the Bridge, but will tune the presence of this live sonic data to the characteristics and architecture of the two spaces in which the work is presented: the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, and the Main Concourse of Southwark Station of the London Underground. Th
3/ DESERT SOUNDINGS – The Gallery, Emirates Palace 2014
by Bill Fontana. 22:17. excerpt
Abu Dhabi Festival 2014.
This multichannel video and sound installation explored the hidden voice of the deserts in the UAE. Groups of accelerometers were buried in the sand dunes revealing that the desert secretly sounds like the sea.
Bill Fontana:
“I began my career as a composer. What really began to interest me was not so much the music that I could write but the states of mind I would experience when I felt musical enough to compose. In those moments, when I became musical, all the sounds around me also became musical.
I have worked for the past 50 years creating installations that use sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural settings. These have been installed in public spaces and museums around the world including San Francisco, New York, Rome, Paris, London, Chicago,Vienna, Berlin, Venice, Sydney,,Tokyo, Barcelona, Linz, Manchester, Istanbul and Abu Dhabi.
My sound sculptures use the human and/or natural environment as a living source of musical information. I am assuming that at any given moment there will be something meaningful to hear and that music, in the sense of coherent sound patterns, is a process that is going on constantly. My methodology has been to create networks of simultaneous listening points that relay real time acoustic data to a common listening zone (sculpture site). Since 1976 I have called these works sound sculptures.
I have produced a large number of works that explore the idea of creating live listening networks. These all use a hybrid mix of transmission technologies that connect multiple sound retrieval points to a central reception point. What is significant in this process are the conceptual links determining the relationships between the selected listening points and the site-specific qualities of the reception point (sculpture site). Some conceptual strategies have been acoustic memory, the total transformation of the visible (retinal) by the invisible (sound), hearing as far as one can see, the relationship of the speed of sound to the speed of light, and the deconstruction of our perception of time.
From the late nineties until the present my projects have explored hybrid listening technologies of acoustic microphones, underwater sensors (hydrophones) and structural/material sensors (accelerometers). Some of my most recent works I call Acoustical Visions and are explorations of the image that a sound makes and the sound that an image makes.”
More information about these works you can find on:
https://www.resoundings.org/
Bill Fontana is represented by:
Southern and Partners
