Artists: Allard Van Hoorn, Tim Bruniges, Sara Wallgren

an exhibition at the School of Visual Arts CP Project Space

Space is Sound

Sound itself holds information. However, it seems only to be witnessed through corporeal sense. It is considered somewhat inaccessible, unable to be utilized in an undecipherable language.

What if sound was able to be cognized as a medium for conveying specific form of thought?

While the concept of truth is contaminated by the former president through an epidemic of virtual manipulations and falsifications

artworks in this exhibition counteract the hijacked and de-credited rhetoric of broken information by presenting alternative understandings of invisible matter read through space.

Opening the processes performed by and during creatively experimenting with the medium unearths affective information that it holds, which invariably influences how we think, and act, in the future.

Parallels are made clear between sound as an information system and its possibilities for resonant cultural meaning.

Sara Wallgren’s series titled Noise Drawings (2015) interprets meaning from unreadable sounds to the visual and tactile medium of graphite on canvas. The uncertainty of noise is inscribed into a drawing, and the process of drawing transfers meaning from one realm to another. It provides a possible framework for opening access to previously unknown information, deciphering an invisible architecture, and redefining associated signification.

Beyond the nexus of definition, Tim Bruniges’ MIRRORS Aalst (2017) offers documentation of an infinite-duration artwork that responds to space, revealing extemporal meaning outside of immediate ambient acoustics. As with the interactions engendered between animate objects, constructing “spaces” of meaning cultivate and expand our awareness and creative potential, surpassing localized place and material bounds through depersonalized experience and affect.

The documentation of Allard van Hoorn’s 005 Urban Songline (Latitude: 35.182182° N – 35.182141° N / Longitude: 126.888579° E – 126.888702° E) (2011) records a performance of space, with the performers fully utilizing its tangible matter to create a language from a linear point in time to the next point within the framework and confines of locale.

Sound is utilized to communicate meaning with the shape of space, and from here, information is transferred to the witness while taking on the process of re-creation or transformation. Sound shows how another layer of sensed architecture is built within physical spaces to create language.

Wall Labels and Artist Bios:

Sara Wallgren

Sweden

Noise Drawings (2015)

Series, 2 of 4

Graphite on canvas

150 x 150 cm (59 x 59 in.)

Courtesy the artist

Noise Drawings (2015) is an interpretation of noise into subjective visual representations made by drawing stipples with graphite on canvas. Tones of grayscale in the drawings correspond to different aural registers of noise inflections from the environment. The interpretation engages sonic information that is normally unrecognizably available as interpretable matter and absorbs it into physical and visual space. Through the transfer process of decoding noise, or disordered information,[1] into drawings, its potential significance is both altered and made known. Sound is at once taken—or, to the contrary, removed—from the environment, while its representation is re-established within the visual realm as a score, not with music notes but with a recorded language of the hand. The invisible is brought into view through the interpretive drawing that frees access to sound information.

Sara Wallgren creates drawings and sculptures that allow us to interact with art objects in unusual ways by aiming to twist our perspective, thereby inviting subjective thought from multiple angles. In her drawing practice, she invents both intentionally and unintentionally coded and imperfect patterns and disseminates tones on canvases, wood, mylar, or other textiles as mechanisms to subjectively research and experiment with the possibilities of visualizing sound frequencies. Oftentimes she employs drawing as a medium that intervenes between already existing sound compositions and her art objects. The process of drawing connects many different elements into the construction of the whole work.[2] Additionally, the artworks serve imagined or practical purposes that bring them to life when realized in the final form.

[1] Bruce Clarke, “Communication and Information: Noise and Form in Michel Serres and Niklas Luhmann,” in Neocybernetics and Narrative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 39-76, ProQuest Ebook Central.

[2] Sara Wallgren and Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge, “Interview between Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge and Sara Wallgren, Sunday the 27th of June 2019, Paul-Lincke-Ufer, Berlin,” in Sara Wallgren: Decay (Göteborg: Rojal Förlag, 2019).

Allard van Hoorn

The Netherlands

005 Urban Songline (Latitude: 35.182182° N – 35.182141° N / Longitude: 126.888579° E – 126.888702° E) (2011)

Choreography and Dance: Byung Hwa Kim (Now Dance Company), Architects On-Site Hub: nOffice, Curators Community Section: Helen Choi, Beatrice Galilee, Jean Im, Videography: Sung Jun Yoo, Still Photography: Sung Bo Shim

Performance document

Film 15:28

Courtesy the artist

The film displayed is a performance document of the 005 Urban Songline (Latitude: 35.182182° N – 35.182141° N / Longitude: 126.888579° E – 126.888702° E) (2011), a musical score derived from recording a live performance, facilitated by van Hoorn, that engaged the site-specific structure of the Communities section of the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale. During the recorded performance, the dancer, Byung Hwa Kim, presented a choreographed shamanic Korean dance with seating blocks that symbolized Mount Mudeungsan. The mountain was a refuge for people during violent student riots that took place in Gwangju in May 1980 and still beholds a soothing counterbalance to the history. The dancer’s performance re-created a more peaceful history of this space in Gwangju city. The songline was played back into the space to complete the cycle of input. The sound work of this piece is derived specifically from the shape of the place it was made and in collaboration with the people for which it was performed to create a language defining the space, writing over the traumatic past.

Allard van Hoorn combines sound, installation, and performance to describe spaces. His practice provides site-specific developments of languages exclusive to the history of the spaces in which they are made. These works are titled Urban Songlines. The name presents a contemporary artistic version of the Australian Aboriginal practice of geographically transmitting stories from community to community with what are called songlines.[1] A traditional songline is sung by the traveler while navigating one point to the next, and moments in the song mark places on Earth and in the sky similar to a map.[2] As can Hoorn’s artworks, they offer frameworks for communicating new or changing meanings to space and community.

[1] Robert S. Fuller, “1.2 Songlines, The Astronomy and Songline Connections of the Saltwater Aboriginal Peoples of the New South Wales Coast” (PhD diss., UNSW School of Humanities and Languages, 2020), 5-6.

[2] Sydney Opera House, “Songlines Explained: A 360 Experience with Rhoda Roberts,” YouTube, video, 4:55, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33O08xrQpR8.

Tim Bruniges

Australia

MIRRORS Aalst (2017)

Microphones, speakers, parabolic concrete acoustic mirrors

Installation document

Film 1:49

Courtesy the artist

MIRRORS Aalst (2017) is an installation document of the Murmur (2017) exhibition, which took place at Netwerk / center for contemporary art in Aalst, Belgium. It consists of two concrete sculptures fabricated as facsimiles of acoustic mirrors found on the coastlines of Abbot’s Cliff in Folkstone, UK that were a failed military technology made to capture sounds of attack and signal warnings to incoming aircraft. These early radar detectors never had a functional role as they immediately became obsolete while still in construction. The significance of the monolithic formations is left in the past, unhinged from the time and place they were invented.

Within each concave indentation of the nine-foot by nine-foot concrete slabs was a microphone embedded at its center, which picked up sounds in the atmosphere and transmitted them into the exhibition space to be fed back to the mirroring structure creating an autopoietic[1] accumulation of sound.[2] The immutable sculptural objects existed spatially, not as instruments; additionally, the aural inflections from the piece were only heard as delays.[3] Therefore, context is not defined by the objects but was absorbed, layered, and amplified through reperformance, gradually growing louder with each reverberation and at the same time, asynchronous from its originator. The attention placed on their spatial immovability rendered them without a sense of beginning or end. The object performances created an immersive system of affect that the audience experienced, but the sounds never correlated to the present moment, dissociating them from transferable meaning.

Tim Bruniges is a sound, visual, and installation artist who creates site-responsive installations that bridge realms of perception to address temporality and possibilities outside the boundaries of time. The majority of his background in musical composition and performance practice inform his spatially oriented visual artworks. More precisely, he experimentally applies the theoretical mechanisms within sound production to various mediums such as sculpture, moving image, and object performance. These conclusive artworks act as beings that receive input from and answer to their surroundings. The artworks are of infinite duration and expected to resonate with the sensed environment beyond layers of temporality and determinate meaning.

[1] Bruce Clarke, “Communication and Information: Noise and Form in Michel Serres and Niklas Luhmann,” in Neocybernetics and Narrative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 39-76, ProQuest Ebook Central.

[2] Nate Freeman, “What's behind the Closure of One of Brooklyn's Best Galleries,” Artsy, October 30, 2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-closure-one-brooklyns-best-galleries.

[3] Charles Eppley, “Aural Mirrors on Sound's Stage,” Hyperallergic, February 13, 2014, https://hyperallergic.com/108910/aural-mirrors-on-sounds-stage/.