One channel audio installation for one speaker, gravel, low frequency sine waves and cardboard box.
GeoPhonoBox an exhibit curated by Chicago based visual and sonic artist
Zoe Asta and Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Peck School
of the Arts, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Rob Danielson. This exhibition
will feature sound recordings about "place" created by sound
artists, nature recordists, ethnographers, composers, pedestrians, geographers
and other practitioners from around the world. Each submission in the
show is to represent one geographic place within the realm of a cardboard
shipping box.
Each artist was sent a cardboard shipping box in which they could include
visual cues, if they desired, along with their sound project. Each box
is displayed in the gallery as it was returned to us from the artists,
the box serving as a document of the distance the sound piece traveled
as well as the container for the visual and auditory elements of the piece.
The title of this piece translates in english to "Gravel from Zurich
Lake."
According to the Call for Participation for the exhibition GeoPhono Box
"each box is to represent sounds of a particular place." I decided
to achieve this not through a recording but with a simple installation
of vibrating gravel collected from the shores of Lake Zurich.
Five pieces of gravel are placed on a 7.5 centimeter speaker. 100 hertz
sine waves played back through the speaker vibrate the gravel. The cardboard
shipping box acts as a resonator, amplifying the otherwise very quiet
sound of the vibrating gravel. A listening hole cut into the top of the
shipping box allows the exhibition visitor to get "inside" the
sound of the vibrating gravel.
"Kies vom Zürcher See" is not merely a symbolic gesture;
for me the sound of the vibrating gravel in the gallery environment closely
parallels the actual sound of the gravel on the shores of Zurich Lake,
where wind and water sends the gravel skittering and vibrating.
