ear(th) was a large scale sound/sculptural work (8′ x 16′ x 24′) commissioned by curator stephen nowlin at the williamson gallery at art center college of design in pasadena california. steve has been a maverick in bringing art and science together, and for the 2004 pasadena art/science festival he invited me to collaborate with scientists from cal tech – and pretty much guided the entire process, meeting with folks at cal-tech and convincing them to work with an artist, as well as bringing in sculptor john o’brien and artist julian goldwhite in for fabrication. i worked with mark simons from cal tech, who provided us with digital information regarding earthquakes that we used as a score. ann marie polsenberg-thomas was the true superhero, drawing up the code so that the robots could read the data and perform the sound composition. at the time, it was the largest sculptural work i’d ever been able to create.
the following text was presented with the installation:
ear(th) was created by translating data of the effects of the earth’s movement during an earthquake, into a score for a sound composition. The same data that generated an interferogram image of the 1999 Landers earthquake, is used as a set instructions to tell 80 small robots to strike glockenspiel bars of different pitches. ear(th) uses the movement of the earth as a model for the sequence of pitches, and the placement of those pitches within an architectural / sculptural space; allowing the earth, through its suggestions of the spatial and musical order of sound, to become the composer and conductor of a piece of music.
Most of my visual and sound works are built from self created systems of translation. The bulk of this work begins with converting the alphabet into a series of numbers (usually a = 1, b = 2, c = 3, etc.); and then using those numbers to determine a series of rules. The rules are then used to generate translations of text into images, objects, films, or sound compositions. These rules and systems are the beginnings, and are intuitive as much as they are pre-determined. They are defined, but not without holes. The attempt is always to turn the initial information into a kind of formal skeleton structure that will then generate intuitive responses in the hope that the finished artwork can transcend, rather than illustrate, the source.
With ear(th), a similar approach to the data source is used. It is present as both a pre-determined structure and a source of intuitive inspiration. At the core of the installation, and composition, is an image documenting the effects of the earth’s movement on a small area of the Mojave Desert in 1999. A series of small sounding robots are constantly reading this data and using it to determine when to make sounds. When I realized that the child’s glockenspiel bars used for the installation happened to be color coded in a way that corresponded to the colors in the interferogram image; it somehow made sense to connect the purple on the data image to a “b” on the glockenspiel and the green to an “f”. Through these kinds of intuitive connections, the interferogram became a guide for mapping the placement of pitches along the roof of the installation. when i finished the map, i realized that the data could not only determine the arrangement of the pitches, but in using the color/ note equivalents, it could also allow me to follow the image as a musical score – once more translating the image into sound. i recorded myself playing the data score and then dropped the pitch of the recording down an octave. this looping recording of a human is interacting with the robots playing live – their relationships are constantly shifting as their cycles are different lengths – perhaps by layering a precise transcription with a human one a suggestion of new images is made.
Just as the installation would look and sound different if the data source was the ocean or Shakespeare; ear(th) in no way attempts to illustrate the earth’s movement or to recreate an earthquake experience through sound. I am much more interested in simply allowing the earthquake data to generate a sound composition and to allow for my own misreadings of the data to suggest placements, sound ideas, performances, and sculptural forms. For me, this process is a kind of alchemy – to allow the materials to be transformed into something completely connected to, yet seemingly distant from, the source.
My sound work has always been about the creation of a listening space and to present sound in a context where listening becomes active. I am interested in the small sounds, unnoticed musics, and found compositions that are everywhere – what Rilke called the “inconsiderable things” that we must be receptive and responsive to in order to experience them. A sound installation, for me, is simply a listening situation. The viewer/listener must come to their own conclusions based on their own experience within the artwork – disconnected from my own ideas and interests. It is my hope that this space is conducive to wondering and wandering.