Content: #18 – Spring 2019 (All texts in English)
LUCIE VÍTKOVÁ
INTRODUCTION
VERED ENGELHARD
BY TRANSPARENCY
KATIE BISHOP
WHO IS A COMPOSER?
MUYASSAR KURDI
EMBODIMENT
TEODORA STEPANČIČ
AUGUST 2017
MIYA MASAOKA
THE VAGINATED CHAIRS
LIZ PHILLIPS / PAULA RABINOWITZ
WAVE CROSSINGS
ISIS BROWN / SADIE YUDKIN
QUEERNESS AND BECOMING IN MUSIC
LUCIE VÍTKOVÁ
COMPOSING EXPECTATIONS
[…] At the window, a scavenged 1960s Japanese telescope picks up light changes from the sky and the moving leaves . In real time, Phillips translates the telescope’s view (using two light sensors in the eyepiece, an analog synthesizer, two oscillators, amplifiers and audio transducers) into sound changes that create patterns in the wavetable’s water. Image becomes sound becomes image. Other objects (conch shells, wooden bowl, bamboo pole, old pot, double lawn chair, water-filled table) in the room act as filters and tactile speakers. Ultrasonic automatic focuses from cameras across the hallway entrance subtly vary filtered changes in the room’s sound based on the viewer’s presence and motion.
Phillips’s early conception for this project was quite different because she had originally been invited to use St. Cornelius Chapel on Governors Island. Its dimensions and materials lent themselves to a more permanent installation, which would employ live feeds from three wave stations (in surrounding waters), a wave table and surround sound with the audience and performance moving through and around the quadrophonic omni-directional speakers and objects and wavetable. In 2015, while recording with many groups of volunteers stationed all over the island, Phillips realized that helicopters dominated the airspace, hovering over the island with tourists seemingly afraid to touch ground. Moreover, the cement walls that hold back the harbor’s waters became oppressive presences in the tidal recordings across.
It became vividly clear that water is primarily heard when it hits a surface. Any floating object—a bamboo rod or a wooden boat or a creaking rope—sang to us from the water. We found only one desirable spot on the island for sound, the Harbor School’s dock, home to the Billion Oyster Project, which generously provided us life jackets. We then began what would become three days of recording sessions with homemade bamboo microphones on the surface during tides, and of creaking ropes and the clattering of the oyster shells as they were pulled from the harbor’s muck dock, learning much about the surface tides and the underwater life there. In addition, this multi-track recording used underwater whale-watching microphones as well as microphones capturing the ambient sounds—air, water, objects. Just as digging underground yields subterranean seismic sounds, it was clear that there was a submerged soundscape beneath the surface as we heard the ferry boats and other sounds that became part of the phrasing of the island. […]
Excerpt from Phillips/Rabinowitz: Wave Crossings
Read more in the physical issue #18 !