Not Here... You Can Look Any PLace
Eight transducers placed on wooden panels and beams. In collaboration with Hans Demeulenaere, curated by Frederik Vergaert for Lokaal 01, Antwerp, Belgium. (November 2011)
In Not Here … You Can Look Any Place, visitors were moving through the installation and the space, choosing different points from which to look and listen. In this work, the horizontality of the installation is central to the experience. Our eyes are drawn to it. What we see is a transparant sculpture or installation, where all technology is visible, and nothing is hidden. Waves of sine tones come and go with no perceivable regularity, blending with each other and creating interferences. The sound of the installation uses the acoustics of the large reverberant space, which results in an interactive experience or ‘acoustic dialogue’. The sound work evolves over time, with moments of ‘low energy’ and moments of ’high energy’, sometimes to the point that it becomes unbearable. Moving your head slightly causes variations of pitch and intensity. The distribution of the sounds over the entire installation allows the visitors to experience the installation in multiple different ways.
The use of recordings of musical instruments in installation works is, to me, a very delicate topic. I think the main reason for this is that, aside from my work as a spatial sound artist, I also collaborate and perform with musicians. Their physical musical presence in a work – the fragile touché of a pianist and the soft sureness of guqin player – is crucial. Although I have used musical sounds in some of my installation works, these sounds tend to become ‘objets sonores’, detached and isolated from their source, thus creating a disassociation of seeing and hearing. What interested me in Not Here … You Can Look Any Place was to stay close to the idea of ‘translating’, without making an illustration of this idea. This is why I didn’t use the recording of the space. Instead, I extracted one element, room mode, which led to the creation of a sound field.
