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Themesicon: navigation pathSound and Imageicon: navigation pathSound affects
 
 
 
 
 

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about a relationship: either a relationship with the space and improvising to the acoustics of the space or it’s just about a kind of dialogue with another musician created live. It’s very similar to some of the dialogues I created with visual artists. I never did any kind of completely audio-visual projects alone, because—when working at the EAI, I was so exposed to the history of video art and I was so aware about what others did and I felt like: I can’t begin as a new visual artist. And I just knew I had something unique with sound that comes out; when I start to make pictures I immediately feel, I’m forcing it. I can work very hard on sound, but I also feel like it’s much more my own voice.

Installations

More permanently are my installations and again it’s a dialogue with the space. The first installation that really broke through for me was developed that way: I had a studio in the World Trade Center on the 91st floor of Tower One for six months in 1999 («World Trade Center Recordings: Winds after Hurricane Floyd, »WorldViews Residency, Open House, 1999, Diapason, NY, 2001, The 2002 Whitney Biennal, 2002). What I

 

realised I was doing was creating a relationship between the image beyond the windows and what was going on on the outside and bringing that sound inside. It again was an audiovisual work that seemed like video or cinema but it was a live environment and I was bringing my own knowledge of sound in a kind of relationship or sensitivity to the image and space. At the end of the residency after six months we had an exhibition and the people came to the studio and saw what’s outside and the sound triggered live what was heard in the room. When it was purchased, it was the first sound artwork purchased by the Whitney Museum in 30 years. They got a single photograph of my studio and then the sound in a surround-sound mix. I went into the basement of the Whitney, where the technical people with the white gloves hang out and they said to me: How should we treat this photograph, is that the artwork? and I said, no, it’s the documentation, the artwork is the sound; but when you exhibit it, my idea is that it’s a very dark room where you see the photograph as a reference to the windows, but then you really eventually close your eyes and listen. I recently went to the Brazilian Amazon

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