When Swiss sound artist Zimoun (his moniker is a phonetic retooling of his first name, Simon) first met Berlin-based media artist and programmer Pe Lang at an electronic music festival in 2004, the two quickly found they shared an intuitive sense of the language of sound. Based on forms and materials more familiar to architecture, the pair gradually developed a collaboration that has come to represent one of contemporary art’s most fascinating and rigorous investigations of acoustic architecture.
Their current project, “untitled sound objects”, has developed into a live performance platform and a series of site-specific installations in which small, electrically-controlled machines – transducers, magnets, door-knockers, vibrating motors, wobbling glass plates – are used to excite existing physical spaces, literally knocking, rubbing, and otherwise agitating the room. Often controlled by a computer, large arrays of these micro-machines produce simple patterns through which larger macro-structures emerge as the individual elements interact with one another and with the space of the work itself.
In performances, this translates into a long table on which small piles of raw materials (plexiglass chips, metal shavings, ball bearings) are placed onto glass plates outfitted with special microphones. The performance consists simply of vibrating these plates at changing rates, creating a rattling and droning that may appear monotonous at first, but whose intricacies emerge subtly and wondrously from within.
Through a rigorous reductionism of the means used to produce sound, the emphasis is taken away from any kind of technological spectacle and kept firmly on the materials and their elaborated behavior in an overall system of events. Indeed, one of the refreshing elements of this work is the immediacy with which one can understand the sound-making process, where each micro-event is present, visible, and concrete. Yet at the same time the resulting complexity of the total system, conjured before your eyes, defies any attempt to dissect it. You might find yourself feeling there is a “prime mover” at work behind the scenes, but in fact it is just the characteristic reaction of materials behaving together and in unison with the space of their activity. A magic of the real.
Underpinning all of Lang and Zimoun’s work is a fascination with the natural algorithms of the sort found in insect swarms and hydrodynamic reactions, in which complexity arises from a multitude of simple interactions. But the pair are not as interested in randomness as they are in the forms and textures that grow organically from complexity and multiplicity. As Zimoun puts it: “We are not preoccupying ourselves with chance factors and generative systems simply to discover unexpected results, but rather so that the compositions can attain a higher level of vitality.”
This vitality is especially obvious in their most recent and ambitious project, a traveling room-within-a-room installation that erases the distinction between instrument and the space of listening. A cube-shaped room is assembled from panels in which eight hundred electromagnets are embedded, each designed to deliver a pinpoint knock against any surface of the cube. Fifty sound transducers are also attached to the room’s panels, capable of vibrating the entire cube with varying degrees of focus. The space that you enter becomes of sound in a very real way, delivering on their desire to “create sound architecture that can be entered and explored like a building”.
Pe Lang and Zimoun’s recently completed tour of the United States included performances of “untitled sound objects” in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, and an exhibition at the Gosia Koscielak Gallery in Chicago.
Link:
www.untitled-sound-objects.ch
