July 01 Gunsaulus Hall, Kent State University, Meadow Piano, eddy imaging, RHIZOME ROUTE:1970s Terraplane Chorographies 1980s

1970 color Lithograph 30x40"

Subsequent projects now and later under this cover also included reel to reel B&W video, natural sound collections via cassette recorder and as a segues beyond MFA days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diploma exhibition, Gunsaulus Hall, Art Institute of Chicago

EAST FACEING CONTEXT VIEW

LEFT VIEW: Prototype of hexagram showing sensor placements on galvanized steel strands, and as wind monitors here, interactive switches available to the participant allow for controlling the "wind" speed from the electric fans. Headphones are available for listening to the amplified sounds produced from the strands.

crystal sensors were attached to strands w/beeswax

3-ring binder coverSAIC student Linda Novak and a detail of LB's Diploma exhibition, Gunsaulus Hall (top GDP photograph, myriad open pages. center, above left)

 

 

MODE: WINDS PLAYING Participants were challenged to produce winds (from w floor fans, r., center: 0 to X rpm) by pulling tubular switches and required two hands to do so. When successful the wind vibrations from the Hexagram strands could be volume controlled at this console. MODE: BRUSH The two right knobs controlled the volume of a two channel cassette mix of sound sculptures and steel wire strandage fron the school roof. MODE: QUITE Were casstette recordings of a fifty foot cable dragging a Shure M637 mike x feet, stop, record and so on during a midnight recording session. Sequential quiets were cassette-edited as on demand tapes by manipulating console switches. Successfuly pulling upwards and holding obvious positions was a real challenge since both sound and fan speed were related. Position one, say, produced the slowest breeze across the wires together with activation of a particular cassette. The highest detent switch position activated additional natural audio sources. The three mode switches produced different layers of content: earphones sounded crickets and breeze-blown dried corn stalks from rural terrain from rural Elmhurst and very faintly, traffic barely audible from Chicago's northbound outer drive at the Belmont Harbor was among natural and diminished urban sounds available

A parabolic reflector picked up gallery voices and retransmitted this sound to hand held FM radios in the hall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kent State University 1/2 hexagram commemorative project entry to mark the site of a death on the campus and the shootings of students by the Ohio National Guard. ' (Kent State lithograph)

...would sounding as very large swarm cloud of bees across the campus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

holographic sonification

The Meadow Piano , a kind of extended and updated Aeolian harp, sits in a large, relatively flat meadow space and is itself 1/16th mile long by 1/8th mile wide. Its horizontal planes (only one is shown in the model), arranged in layers from three feet to three hundred feet above ground, are made up of stainless steel strands of varying diameters; these accomplish an imaging process both audible (by means means of flat response transducers) and visual (through slow scan video) of snow, sleet, hail, rain and mist. The diagonal strands sense soft or gusty surface winds. The bottommost layer or grid gives a readout, again both audible and visually, of the complex thermal variations within the terrain, rising heat eddies, and the earth's ambient magnetism.

1972 MFA multimedia construction

There are touch sounds of raindrops amd snow drops and non touch sounds of concussive thunder and cricket choruses. Insect steps across the strands and the activity of spiders building night webs between strands is available for sensing and recording, as well as the approach of cold or warm fronts. The sudden interrution of light and heat caused by a passing cloud shadow is both seeable and hearable. This is in addition to what the ear might normally garner from the surface cusion sounds of a meadow: the grass whooshings, grasshoppers, redwinged blackbirds, bob-o-links, and snakes in the grass.

Some of these sensed meadow facets can be isolated, and all sounds can be intermixed; in the master control room, the operator of the Meadow Piano can both tune the individual strands and choose particular sounds, as they occur, and personally organize sound. LB writing in YONY, School of the Art Institute, Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith, Co-Editors, 1975-76

 

Meadow Piano's

holographic data imaging mode

Meadow Piano's

holographic mode (B&W Haloid of 30X40" 1972 stone lithographic/collage print)

BraunSixtant dirigible passing above MP's plane.

 

return to earthguest

 

- recontextualizing and transferring global's conjoined inherent sounds/images as a whole-The depicted Braun Sixtant dirigible receives data from a variety of sensors and simultaneously resends these analog mirrorings- which are varied aural surface layerings, including the escarpment's face together with an array of terrain sound and vibrations for multiplex input- and utilizing radar, satellite andFM-transmitting/receiving channels. Together in tandem with visual counterparts, these terrain surfaces are observed by stationary cameras in the dirigible. Imaging this vision uses heat-imaging sensors together with a fish-eye video lens. Incoming inputs are mixed together in the dirigible. This fusion merging of sound and image is intended to provide a perceptually faux holographic whole. This spatial capture, necessarily, includes enrichments from nuanced sound playings of earthen features, whose anomolies may be wind-disturbed, emphasizing aural/visual textures and expected wide ranging fluxed soundings. Realtime describes this cahllenge: these aural and visual counterparts from exisiting inputs are combined (multiplexed) in the Braun Sixtant and are instantly re-relayed to the ground-to-satellite uplink. This whole context is simultaneously handed over (uploaded) to Westar IV satellite and thereafter may be demultiplexed (decoded) and downloaded into the black set top box for re-construction into multiple speakers of all the sound and vision details. more 1pdf, 2

continues