Edgardo Rudnitzky. Border Music, 2016; steel, iron, barbed wire (custom made), 4 melodikons, wooden resonators, bronze, motor; 78.7 x 5.9 in. Courtesy of MUNTREF. Photo: Tania Puente.

Participating artist Edgardo Rudnitzky has said that “sound is never a private thing; in natural terms, sound is always a public matter. We cannot avoid it. One can actively suspend the understanding, but not the faculty of listening to something.”[1] In this sense, his installation Border Music speaks powerfully to the politics of migration and the experience of crossing the border. Border Music is made of a 20-meter rotary machine powered by an engine. Five lines of barbed wire are sent from one side of the machine to the other. The barbs emulate music notes on a staff, and the wires traverse various sound checkpoints where contact with four melodikons and wooden resonators create fragile bell sounds. Within the piece’s intimidating steel frame, the subtle, submerged melody lulls listeners into an ambient contemplation that demands attention to the many tragedies caused by fences and walls that separate nations and communities. The physical divide of space that Border Music creates may be real, but the sounds it emits have no parameters, and will not remain silent.

Edgardo Rudnitzky. Border Music, 2016; steel, iron, barbed wire (custom made), 4 melodikons, wooden resonators, bronze, motor; 78.7 x 5.9 in. Courtesy of MUNTREF. Photo: Tania Puente.

Through the hallway where Border Music is located and into the middle of the main room, which is surrounded by large windows that offer views of the river, is the video installation Angelus Novus. Poet María Negroni and filmmaker Pablo Marín present a two-minute, forty-nine-second video that alternates between visual reels and sound loops excerpted from Negroni’s poem “Exilium.” Walter Benjamin’s studies on Paul Klee’s drawing Angelus Novus are a clear reference for this piece; both address terms of catastrophe and the ruins of history. In the video, Negroni’s sampled voice is repetitive but never quite completes the full loop. The correspondence between her audible declamation and the written text displayed onscreen is never achieved. The text is accompanied by found footage and homemade videotapes that give the viewer the sense that they are entering into a very intimately selected archive of what is lost and found in exile. Although the experience of exile eludes being portrayed in an audiovisual, albeit poetic piece, the medium resonates strongly and impregnates its narrative with empathy and melancholy.

María Negroni and Pablo Marín. Angelus Novus, 2016; two-channel video installation, variable length, color, sound; loop. Courtesy of MUNTREF. Photo: Tania Puente.

Tintin Wulia’s sound installation Babel makes us wonder: Is an immigrant shelter a tower of Babel on its own? In a place where people from different parts of the world, and in considerably vulnerable states, gather in search of assistance, is there a possibility for cultural exchange and a will to understand? Located by one of the building’s two staircases, sixteen speakers play a variety of unintelligible spoken recordings simultaneously. While it is possible for a singular speaker to broadcast each reproduced testimony clearly, the cacophony of all sixteen projecting at once make the messages incomprehensible. What happens to the experience of otherness when all hierarchy is diffused? Can it be grasped? Does it exist? In between speakers and steps on the staircase, the artist has placed small linen pillows that materially invite visitors to stop and listen; with this gesture, Wulia demarcates a space for consciousness, one that demands concentration and compassion.

Tintin Wulia. Babel, 2013; 16-channel synchronized sound installation; 11:45. Courtesy of MUNTREF. Photo: Tania Puente.

Steve Roden’s pieces find a correlation with this question. In his videos, Lines and Faces (2014) and Disorder (2016), audio is barely perceptible, forcing spectators to focus and challenge their preconceived expectations while watching actions that are most often accompanied by loud sounds, such as tearing sheets of paper. Also on display is a series of drawings and collages on sheet music titled Water Music (Drumming), and a series of serigraphs titled Cascade (made in collaboration with Leandro Jacob) that utilizes song lyrics about the rain in different languages. Everything in Roden’s installation speaks about sound, but the artist denies visitors the opportunity of ever listening to it. The room incubates an anxious, outsider feeling.

Exhibition view with art installations by Steve Roden. Courtesy of MUNTREF. Photo: Tres Consultores.

As its title accurately states, Beyond the Sound not only takes the sense of hearing into visuality, literature, and movement, but expands its vehicle to the museum and its history. MUNTREF doesn’t operate merely as a venue for this exhibition—it has an essential role to play in completing the pieces conceptually. The building’s architecture and its various uses throughout history, together with the works installed, craft a sonic palimpsest that holds as many stories as the layers that comprise it.

Más Allá del Sonido will be on view through December 30, 2016.

[1] Spoken at the conference “En los Bordes de lo Real,” 10º Meeting Sur Global, MUNTREF, September 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d26r7mtko9k&feature=youtu.be.

Tomás Saraceno. Omega Centauri 1 Nephila Kenianensis 4 Cyrtophora Citricola, 2014; spidersilk, carbon fiber, light, tripod. Courtesy of the Artist and Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin.

The gallery hums with screechy sounds resembling acoustic feedback, punctuated by random bursts of bass and cartoonish sound effects. The soundscape is queasily amorphous and disorienting, built on dissonance and the chaotic rhythms resonating from a handful of arachnids that have woven fine, thick webs around delicate wire frames. Featuring a plethora of spiderweb sound installations, Tomás Saraceno’s latest show Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions is an experimental drive to amplify and record the vibrations created when spiders communicate, and using special sensory devices, like transducers and laser Dopplers, that map their movements. When made perceivable to human ears, these vibrations—spontaneously produced in a freewheeling environment—enable jam sessions to become integral part of the show, where musicians have been invited to respond to the arachnids’ vibrational signals in a bid for interspecies mingling.

In spite of what the name of the exhibition suggests, the curatorial framework of the show is given vague, but stylish parameters that situate Saraceno’s oeuvre on the crossroads of art, architecture, and science. To term Saraceno’s show as “sound art” or “sound installation,” would be an underestimation of the multivalent nature of an artistic practice that prizes interaction, interconnectedness, and a kind of new order that can only form out of an established network of chaos.

Tomás Saraceno. Spider Salon: Jam Session with Evan Ziporyn with Cyrtophora citricola duet on semi social musical instrument SXDF-NB1006-2: built by four Cyrtophora citricola, eight weeks, on September 28, 2015 (performance still). Courtesy of Studio Tomás Saraceno.

Built upon the notion of conceiving “alternative ways of knowledge, experience, and interaction”[1], Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions comfortably slips out of any attempt at definition or categorization, playing to its own brassy tune in interrogating the nuances within the established structures of knowledge. In the enveloping darkness of the gallery space, glowing glass cases suspend the webs in the expanse of space, lending metaphorical and literal weight to each installation: a small, chaotic network of nature whose interconnectedness parallels transnational urban systems and galactic spirals in both shape and behavior. Their imaginative, gemlike exquisiteness, however, is muted by the sheer amount of technical and scientific information provided in the catalog, like a well-timed reminder that its beauty is a construct out of the precise observation of nature.

Tomás Saraceno. Spiderweb sonification experiments in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Hannelore Hoch and Roland Mühlenthaler, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, 2014 (performance still). Courtesy of Studio Tomás Saraceno.

A spiderweb functions as a visual metaphor for what Saraceno prefers to term as the “cosmic web,” a persistent theme that is demonstrated over and over in varying forms and materials throughout the course of his artistic practice. The web begins with a single thread flung into the wind, where by chance, the filament of silk catches on an object that will anchor its structure. Only then does the web’s tridimensional complexity—assembled upon mathematical principles of radial lines and auxiliary spirals—start to take shape, as form and function come together geometrically to create a product of precision engineering. Social .. Quasi Social .. Solitary .. Spiders … On Hybrid Cosmic Webs (2013) features multi-tiered, collaboratively woven webs by different species of spiders showing grades of sociability: social (living together in a community on a single web), quasi-social, and solitary (living alone in a web). These hybrid webs interlink, morph, and shift, serving as instruments for communication and cooperation. Saraceno’s working process mirrors the spiders’ complex web-spinning processes, if not in precision, at least in form, invoking ideas that begin on the ground and end up somewhere in the cosmos: an envisioned future formed by collaborative forces, perfected by technology and sustained by trailblazing ideas.

Tomás Saraceno. Social .. Quasi Social .. Solitary .. Spiders … On Hybrid Cosmic Webs, 2013; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin. ©Andrea Rossetti.

“When cosmologists or astrophysicians were trying to explain how the universe had formed, the way how they describe [that] type of cosmic web and the geometrical analogy as they like to use is tridimensional spiderweb,” Saraceno says. Indeed, his constructs mimic what already exists in nature; from cosmic macrostructures to biological microsystems, his many projects of interests interrogate an endlessly expanding cluster of ideas grounded in socialist sustainability, until they morph and materialize into schools of thought that span multidisciplinary practices—again, not dissimilar to the process of web spinning.

The material results of these combining fields of knowledge are large-scale productions of networked utopias, cloud cities, and scalable installations that contain the indispensable notion of connectivity, found in the complex ecosystem of a spiderweb, the morphology of cloud formations, and within sociological and evolutionary pathways. In Galaxy Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web (2008), interwoven elastic ropes are stretched across floors, walls, and ceilings, over and around viewers. A single touch of the elastic connectors sends reverberations through this simulacrum of a universe, allusively drawing attention to concepts of social theory, patterns of networks and spheres that seem to articulate the basic structures of contemporary interaction.

Tomás Saraceno. Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, 2009; installation view, Venice Biennale, 2009. Courtesy of Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Alessandro Coco.

As far as exhibitions go, Saraceno’s ambitions are hard work, literally and figuratively. They straddle high conceptualism and scientific research, borrowing heavily from the technical language of visionary architects like Buckminster Fuller, and require years to complete. Underlying the web’s intertextuality is the subliminal emphasis on the selfless collective, and in a culture where individualism dominates, that is perhaps the hardest to understand.

Tomás Saraceno: Arachnid Orchestra Jam Sessions is on view at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore through December 20, 2015.

[1] Tomás Saraceno: Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions. Press release and exhibition catalog.

Janet Cardiff. The Forty Part Motet, 2001; installation view, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, gallery 308, San Francisco, 2015. Courtesy of Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photo: JKA Photography.

Spem in alium nunquam habui 
Praeter in te, Dues Israel

I have never put my hope in any other
But in You, O God of Israel.

On paper, the first two lines of Thomas Tallis’s motet, composed in 1573, pack no special punch. Yet the effect of the words is rather different when the musical composition is played through forty speakers in Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet (2001), now at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. The speakers are set in the form of an oval with two benches at the center, where Tallis’s motet, as recorded by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir, plays on a fourteen-minute loop.

Most listeners followed one of two paths: starting in the center and spiraling out, or beginning next to one speaker and slowly spiraling their way in. The audience is allowed the opportunity to hear forty voices in unison, then they can walk a bit closer and listen to just twenty, then ten, then just five, until finally they usually end up in front of one speaker. I, too, often found myself chasing one particular voice, as if beckoned by a siren’s song. Yet seldom did I find the voice before the part was over.

The alternating voices give the piece a sense of movement and life, though the only movement is that of the spectators. Indeed, that’s one of the goals of the piece; Cardiff’s work allows viewers (or listeners? or audience members?) to go inside the motet and interact with it. Glancing at fellow listeners, at least half have closed their eyes. Some transformation has occurred, as many appear mesmerized, or in an ecstatic state.

Cardiff’s work allows for the contemporary reexamination of the Renaissance’s motet, but it is the location that makes the work even more poignant. The scenic view out of the window looks toward the East Harbor and, further out, the Golden Gate Bridge. For at least fourteen minutes, one’s ears and eyes are so thoroughly occupied that it is difficult to think of anything else but the music and the view. Audience members can discover the power of an impeccably composed piece of religious choral music in a modern, secular context, one that is as close to transcendental as any in San Francisco.

Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet is on view at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture through January 18, 2016. 

________

Henry Rittenberg is a recent graduate of Hamilton College, where he studied art history. He is now studying photography in New York.

Tomás Saraceno. Omega Centauri 1 Nephila Kenianensis 4 Cyrtophora Citricola, 2014; spidersilk, carbon fiber, light, tripod. Courtesy of the Artist and Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin.

In spite of what the name of the exhibition suggests, the curatorial framework of the show is given vague, but stylish parameters that situate Saraceno’s oeuvre on the crossroads of art, architecture, and science. To term Saraceno’s show as “sound art” or “sound installation,” would be an underestimation of the multivalent nature of an artistic practice that prizes interaction, interconnectedness, and a kind of new order that can only form out of an established network of chaos.

Tomás Saraceno. Spider Salon: Jam Session with Evan Ziporyn with Cyrtophora citricola duet on semi social musical instrument SXDF-NB1006-2: built by four Cyrtophora citricola, eight weeks, on September 28, 2015 (performance still). Courtesy of Studio Tomás Saraceno.

Built upon the notion of conceiving “alternative ways of knowledge, experience, and interaction”[1], Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions comfortably slips out of any attempt at definition or categorization, playing to its own brassy tune in interrogating the nuances within the established structures of knowledge. In the enveloping darkness of the gallery space, glowing glass cases suspend the webs in the expanse of space, lending metaphorical and literal weight to each installation: a small, chaotic network of nature whose interconnectedness parallels transnational urban systems and galactic spirals in both shape and behavior. Their imaginative, gemlike exquisiteness, however, is muted by the sheer amount of technical and scientific information provided in the catalog, like a well-timed reminder that its beauty is a construct out of the precise observation of nature.

Tomás Saraceno. Spiderweb sonification experiments in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Hannelore Hoch and Roland Mühlenthaler, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, 2014 (performance still). Courtesy of Studio Tomás Saraceno.

A spiderweb functions as a visual metaphor for what Saraceno prefers to term as the “cosmic web,” a persistent theme that is demonstrated over and over in varying forms and materials throughout the course of his artistic practice. The web begins with a single thread flung into the wind, where by chance, the filament of silk catches on an object that will anchor its structure. Only then does the web’s tridimensional complexity—assembled upon mathematical principles of radial lines and auxiliary spirals—start to take shape, as form and function come together geometrically to create a product of precision engineering. Social .. Quasi Social .. Solitary .. Spiders … On Hybrid Cosmic Webs (2013) features multi-tiered, collaboratively woven webs by different species of spiders showing grades of sociability: social (living together in a community on a single web), quasi-social, and solitary (living alone in a web). These hybrid webs interlink, morph, and shift, serving as instruments for communication and cooperation. Saraceno’s working process mirrors the spiders’ complex web-spinning processes, if not in precision, at least in form, invoking ideas that begin on the ground and end up somewhere in the cosmos: an envisioned future formed by collaborative forces, perfected by technology and sustained by trailblazing ideas.

Tomás Saraceno. Social .. Quasi Social .. Solitary .. Spiders … On Hybrid Cosmic Webs, 2013; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin. ©Andrea Rossetti.

“When cosmologists or astrophysicians were trying to explain how the universe had formed, the way how they describe [that] type of cosmic web and the geometrical analogy as they like to use is tridimensional spiderweb,” Saraceno says. Indeed, his constructs mimic what already exists in nature; from cosmic macrostructures to biological microsystems, his many projects of interests interrogate an endlessly expanding cluster of ideas grounded in socialist sustainability, until they morph and materialize into schools of thought that span multidisciplinary practices—again, not dissimilar to the process of web spinning.

The material results of these combining fields of knowledge are large-scale productions of networked utopias, cloud cities, and scalable installations that contain the indispensable notion of connectivity, found in the complex ecosystem of a spiderweb, the morphology of cloud formations, and within sociological and evolutionary pathways. In Galaxy Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web (2008), interwoven elastic ropes are stretched across floors, walls, and ceilings, over and around viewers. A single touch of the elastic connectors sends reverberations through this simulacrum of a universe, allusively drawing attention to concepts of social theory, patterns of networks and spheres that seem to articulate the basic structures of contemporary interaction.

Tomás Saraceno. Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, 2009; installation view, Venice Biennale, 2009. Courtesy of Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Alessandro Coco.

As far as exhibitions go, Saraceno’s ambitions are hard work, literally and figuratively. They straddle high conceptualism and scientific research, borrowing heavily from the technical language of visionary architects like Buckminster Fuller, and require years to complete. Underlying the web’s intertextuality is the subliminal emphasis on the selfless collective, and in a culture where individualism dominates, that is perhaps the hardest to understand.

Tomás Saraceno: Arachnid Orchestra Jam Sessions is on view at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore through December 20, 2015.

[1] Tomás Saraceno: Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions. Press release and exhibition catalog.