Colour and Sound, Sequence and Series, Shadow and Stuff

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BACKGROUND This project engages in sound culture research, in particular sound art that integrates thoughtfully with site, and uses visual and audible clues to create a complex audiovisual extension of site. This debate is current in site-specific sound installations by Cardiff and Miller (Documenta 2012, Sydney Biennale 2014), and scholarly texts Spaces Speak, Are You Listening, 2007, by Blesser and Salter and Hirschhorn Museum's Visual Music: Synaesthesia in the Arts 2005. This project asks in particular how found and generated sound and imagery can interplay to create new complex audiovisual experiences that build on site. CONTRIBUTION In practical terms this project consists of 2 major works-audiovisual exhibition and 2 sound performance-thereby engaging multiple responses to site-specific engagements with a pier, combined here as one output. It contributes to site-specific sound installation by developing a sound installation of hisses and hums that add in an organic manner to water and ferry sounds found on the pier, yet renders these relationships anew by their creation on domestic record players. In performance the interplay between live sound and improvisation was emphasised. Similarly, the placement of 12 turntables and 24 speakers echoed the store-room feel of the exhibition space but extended it into soundings. The tensioning of paintings, created on site, into the window frames, rendered the notion of a tensioned relationship to site physical, while also emphasising the alternating role of framing and concealing of site. SIGNIFICANCE This new work was commissioned for Around sound art, the flagship festival of Hong Kong's premier sound art organisation sound pocket. Curated independently by Carlo Fossati (Gallery e/static Turin Italy), major international exhibiting artists included Phill Niblock and Akio Suzuki. The festival was supported by Hong Kong Arts Development Council and Japan Foundation. My work was favourably reviewed in Art Review Asia.