ahistoryofreading & 1000 accidents: Richard Grayson
In Phase-Inversion, Adam Donovan and Benjamin Marks constructed a haunting sound sculpture/environment. This collaborative venture was sonorous in its scientific and artistic means; it was one of those rare works which moves across art (sculpture and music) and science, founding art in a technological domain. Donovan has been using parabolic (or curved) dishes to research and explore the 'sculptural specificity of sound and sound projection'. The seven movable dishes, each measuring 1.2 metres, were cast in bluish resin and were luminescent in the dim gallery, casting enormous shadows across the walls. Despite the obvious weight of the dishes and their mounts, these watery shadows coupled with the fleeting movements of composition gave this installation an ethereal quality.
Having generated a soundscape of manipulated spoken word on computer, those sounds were sent via separate tracks to each dish. They were projected into the dishes, bouncing back into the ether. Each soundtrack was thrown at a different dish and sounds seemed to travel around the room. The work was eerie, disorienting and surprising. I could not help but define my proximity or position in relation to the sounds, searching or anticipating the location of the next one to affirm or adjust my position. The sound created and mapped space, as well as the bodies which occupied that space. Instead of searching for meaning or narrative emerging from the spoken word, I searched for rhythm and melody: the content seemed irrelevant. Roles were exchanged and this sonorous space moved me, compelled me. For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari:
Sound owes [its] power not to signifying or 'communicational' values…nor to physical properties…but to a phylogenetic line, a machinic phylum that operates in sound