Bill Fontana will give a presentation on Imaginary Acoustic Visions at CCRMA, Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, on Monday 19 October, 17:30–19:00. It is free and open to the public, with examples of his sound sculptures played in the room. CCRMA asks for an RSVP only if you want pizza afterwards.
The subtitle is the thesis of a career: Seeing with My Ears and Hearing with My Eyes.
What he does
Fontana has worked with sound as a sculptural medium since the late 1960s — a 55-year practice. CCRMA’s description of the method is precise: he uses sound “to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural spaces,” drawing out patterns from natural and man-made worlds to create works that “have the potential to conjure up visual imagery in the mind of the listener.”
The characteristic form is the live listening network: microphones placed at a site, transmitting its real sound, in real time, into somewhere else. Not a recording played back. Not a composition inspired by a place. The actual acoustic life of a structure, relayed.
What that does to an audience is specific and hard to achieve any other way. You stand in a gallery and hear a bridge — not a representation of a bridge, the bridge, now — and the gallery’s own space is reorganised around a structure that is not there.
The sources he has listened to
The list CCRMA gives of what Fontana’s listening networks have collected is the most instructive part of his biography, because the choice of source is the work:
- The Large Hadron Collider at CERN
- The Millennium Bridge in London
- The silenced bells of Notre Dame and the Great Bell of the Vatican
- Hydroelectric turbines
- Fog horns in San Francisco
- The Bosporus in Istanbul and its cisterns
- The melting Dachstein Glacier
- Old-growth forests, rain forests on three continents, the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula
- The sea off the Normandy coast; diverse urban and marine environments
- “The slowly vanishing sounds of Japan”
- The imagined sounds of the Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin
Several of these are structures whose sound nobody was intended to hear. A bridge has a vibrational life under traffic and wind that is inaudible from the deck and recoverable with accelerometers. A glacier melting is an acoustic event. The Notre Dame bells, silenced by the fire, still exist as physical objects that can be excited and listened to.
That is the conceptual engine: the sound is already there and we are not equipped to hear it, and the artwork is the act of making the inaudible audible without altering it. It is closer to instrumentation than to composition, which is why the works survive translation between radio, gallery and public space.
Where the work has been
Fontana has realised sound sculptures and radio projects for institutions worldwide: the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Shanghai; the Vatican; the Whitney; the Arc de Triomphe; Tate Modern and Tate Britain and the Palace of Westminster in London; the 1999 Venice Biennale; SFMOMA; MAXXI and Madison Square Park; MAAT in Lisbon; Arter in Istanbul; the Garage Museum in Moscow; Museum Ludwig in Cologne; the Kunsthaus Graz; the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne; the Art Gallery of NSW; the Art History and Natural History Museums in Vienna.
And major radio commissions: the BBC, the European Broadcasting Union, the ABC, NPR, WDR, Swedish Radio, Radio France, and Austrian State Radio.
The radio list matters more than it might appear. Broadcast was the natural distribution medium for live listening networks decades before streaming existed, and a practice built on real-time relay found its audience through the one infrastructure already designed for exactly that.
Why go, if you work in this field
If you build installations, Fontana’s practice is the most rigorous available argument for a position that is easy to assert and hard to execute: that the content of a site-specific work should come from the site.
The common version of site-specificity is a work placed in a space and tuned to it. Fontana’s version is a work whose material is the space’s own physical behaviour, which means the artistic decisions are about where to put a transducer and what to relay where — decisions about attention rather than about authorship. That is a demanding discipline, and it is why these works do not date.
Monday, 17:30, free. CCRMA’s talks are small rooms, and this one is a 55-year practice explained by the person who built it.
Sources
- Bill Fontana: Imaginary Acoustic Visions | Seeing with My Ears and Hearing with My Eyes — CCRMA event listing
- CCRMA, Stanford University
- Bill Fontana: The makings of a sound sculptor — SFMOMA on YouTube
- Resoundings — Bill Fontana