Art: In the Ear of the Beholder
15 February 2002

Atau Tanaka and the Sensorband
use body movements to create sonic
art for the Activating the Medium
festival.

Eardrums in California are about to get a workout when artists gather to unleash the latest developments in sonic art upon the museum-going public.

The fifth Activating the Medium festival, a major global sound art event, is hitting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on Friday and Saturday, before resonating in four other California venues.

The legitimization of sound art is a recent phenomenon, largely brought about by the new media curators of museums such as SFMOMA, ZKM Karlsruhe in Germany, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

"Sound, when placed within the context of a museum, is automatically afforded a certain deserved validity to an audience that might not necessarily be aware of it otherwise," said Kathleen Forde, curatorial associate of media arts at SFMOMA.

Emerging from a tangle of wires, sensors, computers, speakers and screens, the works will demonstrate the diversity of sound art. "Sound is a hybrid of other media," said Randy Yau, founder and co-curator of Activating the Medium. "It's interdisciplinary and takes many forms, from sound in architecture to sound in the visual arts to pure sound."

Visitors will witness both the work of artists who create "instruments" they play during live performances and the work of those who build soundscapes from abstract environments.

Dutch composer Edwin van der Heide is an artist who uses abstract environments. A member of the interactive technology performance trio, Sensorband -- with Polish-Swedish composer Zbigniew Karkowski and Japanese-American performer Atau Tanaka -- van der Heide likes to think of the body as a giant, hyperactive computer mouse.

"There's a big difference between using the body to control sound and clicking a mouse," van der Heide said. "The body can move in many ways to produce different effects, while clicking a mouse always produces the same effect."

In one Sensorband work, van der Heide uses ultrasound to make music by manipulating sensors strapped to his hands. During a performance, he dances around the stage with his colleagues, creating a wildly textured aural experience by moving his arms together and apart. It's as if he is playing an invisible accordion.

In Net OSC, Sensorband's 20-minute exploration of the Internet as a musical instrument for this year's festival, van der Heide and his colleagues use Internet connection signals as their sound source.

The signals are parsed through laptop computers and manipulated by the artists in real-time. The worse the connection, the better the sound, according to van der Heide. "Sometimes the connection is so bad, it's like you're trying to contact the moon," he said. "I like that though, because it emphasizes the distance."

During the event at SFMOMA, van der Heide and Karkowski perform on-site, while Tanaka is in contact from Paris. A graphic representation of the sound parameters, including frequency and pitch, is visible to the audience on screens as the artists blast sound loops from captured frequencies. Although the structure of the piece has been predetermined, the artists exchange ideas during the performance using instant messaging technology. The audience can see the discussion evolve on screen as they listen.

Meanwhile, Scott Arford of San Francisco, who works primarily with sound and video, makes art out of abstract noise. His work, Static Room (3), takes video static and translates it into sound on a computer. Matching spiky, geometric visuals with lapping waves of noise that seem to grow from beneath the audience's feet, Arford aims for a synaesthetic experience.

"There's no dominance of sound or image over each other," Arford said. "I'm interested in being able to see a sound and hear an image.

" Despite only gaining recent acceptance among curators of major museums, sound art as a medium goes way back. Avant-garde artists of the early 1900s such as Luigi Russolo experimented with the idea of turning urban noise like backfiring motors and bawling crowds into art.

Some years later, the composer John Cage articulated a similar desire in his 1937 treaty, "The Future of Music: Credo." Cage wrote: "The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between stations. Rain. We want to capture these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments."

Whether the works featured in Activating the Medium will be considered as boundary-defying music or simply white noise by museum-goers, the staff at SFMOMA are prepared for some serious volume. "We'll be providing ear-plugs," assured Forde.

Copyright Wired Digital Inc.