Disembodied Meditation

Frontispiece. TJ Norris, (foreground) Untitled (Ground Two), wood, Plexiglas, strobe, boombox, digital print on vinyl (2003); (background) Untitled (Six Inside), plastic, wood, CD players, light source, 2003.

© TJ Norris

I created Genometrics as Part I of Tribryd, a three-part installation series. I began the series in 2001 as a way to play with barely visible, microscopic worlds. Through basic linguistic play and assorted reference sounds, I styled the work from the remnants of street graffiti imagery washed away by city workers and natural urban/architectural decay. Dots and pigments became bubbly white sculptures and Plexiglas silhouettes. The project became an incubator for imaginary contemporary sciences, filtering fantasy DNA, cloning and other genetic forensics.

I asked three sound artists to join me in creating compositions that would be used as elements in the final installation. The project was born from this sound space, influenced by their collaborations, where the breath and void of each silence and the tiniest noises they created informed the construction of my work—a yin-yang gesture between artists, or a continuum, something not unlike a Dadaist poem. Each composer designed an original soundtrack for an imaginary space that then influenced the overall production of the installation-piece-in-progress.

In creating the sculptural elements for the installation I intentionally incorporated both natural (wood, beeswax, twine) and synthetic (Mylar, Dacron, Plexiglas, CDR/boombox) materials. The completed work has interactive and atmospheric elements. Seeking to create a sense of double entendre, I use sculptural shapes in the form of old radios, orbs and tunnels (voids) that make incidental references designed to lead the audience through mysterious metaphors that infer communication structure and breakdown. My use of translucent media including Plexiglas, Mylar, glycerine and beeswax, while minimal, was intended to achieve a luminescent, floating effect.

The images reference both human mark-making (graffiti) and that of nature (wind, rain, rust) throughout. This was the first "cell" of the process. Each image acts like a drawing, a blueprint, for lines that evoke sounds. Some of the images recall actual musical compositions but are a bit more raw, like the gestures in cave drawings. In each image the rough lines and colors, bright and faded, capture in their own still sense the atonality in the sound work that influenced them. Themes of time, age/distress and the illusion of imperfection emerge.

While designing Untitled (Six Inside) (Section Frontispiece, background), I was immediately struck by the birth/origins of mass-broadcast radio when replaying the soundtrack composition by the Dutch electroacoustic band Beequeen. The piece uses both digital and analog sinewave signals and other sound samples. I built the installation piece to resemble a flattened and anonymous version of an original 1920s Philco radio; its shape, as viewers noted, was reminiscent of anything from a tombstone to a missile, and its anonymity served to encourage dialogue with the immediate audience. Sometimes simplicity truly evokes the greatest interchange between artist and audience. The physical work has a strong physical sense of silence, and by using headphones I intend to bring the viewer closer to the piece in order to experience an atonal sound work that offsets the raw, static visual nature of the piece.

For Untitled (Ground Two) (Frontispiece, foreground), I worked with a carpenter to construct a cube using both natural and industrial materials (wood and Plexiglas). The piece blurs the lines between mechanical and voice samples, as the composition "Ground Two" by the group Illusion of Safety (Chicago) reshapes the sounds of schoolyard children playing with improvised stringed instruments and digitally replicated "pops" on old LPs, making the listening experience intimate and animated.

Untitled (Bestesends), the third sculptural piece in the Genometrics installation, has a formidable sense of containment, the residue of something secretive. I used organic compounds that naturally separate when conjoined (glycerin and beeswax) to form objects to accompany the sound work (developed with the New York group Humectant Interruption), thus evoking the mass production of...