when books are like butterflies...

some images of one of the sound installations i presented in kortrijk belgium for the happy new ears festival, which opened a few days ago. the piece was installed in the old beguinage in the center of town on the second floor of the st. anne's hall, and is titled 'when books are like butterflies'. it was loosely inspired by georges rodenbach's book bruges-la-morte, not so much the story, as the atmosphere of the text. i began by notating every sound in the book as well as every color in sequence, and then used the lists to generate a sound work, a text work, and a set of images. the text and images appear in the form of dust jackets, which frame the speakers playing a 13 minute audio piece through 15 speakers (and the images are mostly from the backgrounds of some of the old music photos i typically run on airforms). rather than create an illustration of the text or a work that conceptually fits cleanly into a single resolve related to the text, the piece presents numerous paths through the same information, allowing the sounds in the book to manifest themselves in different forms (i.e. as sound, text, and image). my main interest is in creating a space of intimate wandering, where one has to get close to the books not only to read and see, but to begin to approach the activity of listening with the same intimate response to reading and looking at small things. even though they are birthed from the same source, the text sound and images do not inform each other as much as they offer different paths of experience.

nothing but what is therein contained...

thomas walter's original design for founder's hall at girard college was based on stephen girard's incredibly detailed requirements for the building as stated in girard's will. walter's first first drawings are extremely minimal, and titled "nothing but what is therein contained". the phrase refers to the fact that these initial designs basically followed the stipulations of girard's will, and nothing was added that wasn't mentioned in the will. i wonder how the structure would've looked had it been built following these original plans. the outside of the final design shows more of walter's grand greek influences than girard might have wished, but much of girard's original ideas were followed on the inside.

the four dome shaped rooms on the top floor are acoustic wonders, and during my performances the past few nights i was able to use acoustic objects without amplification and to blend them with the electronic sounds at a relatively close volume. the ways sound travels around the space is pretty extraordinary.

while the installation in the archive worked in relation to the contents of that space (which also had a very different response to sound because of all the paper and cardboard); the two installations in the other dome rooms worked to exploit many of the acoustic characteristics of the architecture - and were approached through walter's use of the phrase "nothing but what is therein contained" in that i used only sounds and objects found in the space.

the field recordings, all made within the space, contained the natural sound of the space, which when played back in the space, essentially sounded in response to the architecture twice. in some instances you could hear things better from across the room than standing over the speaker, and in others, if your eyes were closed you had absolutely no idea where the sound was coming from. the amazing thing is that this didn't always mean muddy sound, in fact a number of sounds had an incredibly tactile presence to them.

the installations were opened to the public around 7:15 pm until the performance which started at 8. during this time, because there is no electrical lighting in the space, the room went from evening's soft light to near darkness, and after the performance, around 8:45 only the small camping lanterns to light the space. the performance and the installations felt very much as soundtracks to the moving of light to darkness...