Archisonics
“..People never tire of recalling that Leonardo Da Vinci advised painters who lacked inspiration when faced with nature, to contemplate with a reflective eye the cracks in an old wall! For there is a map of the universe in these lines that time draws on these old walls. And each of us has seen a few lines on the ceiling that appeared to chart a new continent..”
From The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, Beacon Press 1969
One of the main foci of the Archisonics project is to demonstrate correlations and correspondences between the disciplines of sound/music and architecture/form. FOURM have created Sounding Spaces to illustrate some of the formal elements that unite these two disciplines by taking location recordings from within and around the SHUNT building and it’s immediate vicinity, paying particular attention to small, discrete auditory presences, the gentle hum of a generator, for instance, or the small sounds picked up from heating systems,lighting, air movement, human interventions and activities. In this way, an alternative portrait emerges, as FOURM layer and composite these tiny sounds into a minimal active fabric in the installation space, a fascinating composition that demands focused attention and prolonged listening.
Within this space, the built form is the only source of sound, buildings literally become instruments, as with the use of carefully placed contact microphones and sensitive recording equipment, the hidden life of the building is revealed and amplified. This creates a blurring of boundaries, dissolving the musical instrument, and replacing it with location, place, spatiality, movement, physical presence, and environmental noises, a process that simultaneously unites architecture with its context.
FOURM began in 2007 as an experimental offshoot of the highly successful Level project, taking a more exploratory and investigative approach to sound outside of the established frameworks and boundaries of “composition”.
FOURM attempts to re-site and reconfigure sound, taking it beyond the level of passive “entertainment”, by creating structures and atmospheres that work in harmony with personal space, and within, and through architecture (dubbed “ARCHISONICS” by the artist). More recently, FOURM has been working on microsonic, and particulate structures, taking examples from a fusion of natural, architectural, and pure sculptural form. Rather than being interpreted as music, these auditory formations are best approached as temporal sculpture created with sound, at once fixed and recorded, yet emerging from a fluid and transitional digital medium.
