Sonic Residues 02 (review)

Sonic Residues 02. Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia, 17 November-2 December 2000

Sonic Residues 02, curated by Garth Paine, was a two week celebration of electroacoustic music and sound art held at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne. ACCA is one of Australia's premiere venues for the presentation of contemporary art. During these two weeks, in addition to being the exhibition space for a changing program of sound art installations, ACCA was transformed into a venue for the concert presentation of a wide range of electroacoustic, electronic, and acousmatic music. Two forums were also conducted during the festival. The first was a presentation concerning various issues surrounding spatialization. The second took the form of a panel discussion centered around issues arising from the perceived tensions and shared influences of popular-based sound and music performance art practice on the one hand, and more academically based creative fields in sonic art on the other.

Following an international call for both installation pieces and concert works in the electroacoustic genre, Mr. Paine put together a festival program of exceptional variety and quality. The call for works set the tone in that it made no clear differentiation between creative activity in the forms of installation art or musical composition. The original call introduced the two principal categories of "Evolutionary Pieces" and "Works of Finite Duration" that would reflect the four following themes: "works generated from text or voice-based material; works that use found sounds, molded to create new sonic worlds that extend our notions of acoustic reality; works that use exclusively electronically generated sounds; and interactive works that allow the audience to physically engage with the work through movement and behavior, to create and/or experience the multi-faceted sound world of the work itself." This created the framework for the ensuing two-week festival. I assisted Mr. Paine in preparing the concert program, and specifying and operating the multi-channel diffusion system used for the concerts.

ACCA is housed in the historic former home of the Colonial Lieutenant-Governor-La Trobe, within Melbourne's Domain Gardens. The festival opened with seven sound-art installations distributed throughout the gallery's four rooms, the entry foyer, and the garden at the rear of the gallery. These installations were open to the public during gallery hours throughout the first week of the festival. A second set of installations were presented during the second week. The range of installation works reflected the broad and inclusive nature of the festival programming.

During the first week, the sound installations included a piece by Melbourne-based experimental musician and sound designer, Nat Bates, entitled Sonorhythmosis. This piece occupied the entry foyer of the gallery and took the form of an arcade video game complete with joystick and buttons within an authentic game console. The work is thoroughly interactive, inviting the participant to play with the abstract graphical objects via the user interface. Through a process of clicking and dragging, the user is able to modify and navigate through a symbolic landscape comprising a number of colored circles. The game provides visual and audible feedback describing the path or trajectory through a continuously variable mix of the pulsing or looping sounds associated with each object, the level of each sound being proportional to the user's proximity to its associated object on the screen. By modifying the positions of each of these "sonic objects," the user can adapt the sonic density of the symbolic landscape to suit their preference. Despite the limited range of physical control and the unrelenting looping sounds of the installation when at rest, the work provided considerable amusement and fascination for visitors unprepared for the re-purposing of an arcade game within a gallery context.

Gallery 1 at the rear of the building housed an installation work by myself entitled Soniferous Objects. This installation comprises five objects presented on plinths. The objects include an electromechanical adding machine, an old Bakelite radio, a suitcase, a metal cooking pot, and...