Don't try to work out what's going on in Two Places, just enjoy the strange brew of sound and space, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
'No comprehension required to access this work," reads one of Slavek Kwi's notes for his contribution to Two Places, an interdisciplinary exhibition of sound art at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast and, simultaneously, at Limerick University campus. It could serve as the event's motto, because it's best to approach it without preconceptions, partly because it is by its nature innovative, and partly because the seven participating artists or artistic partnerships exemplify significantly different approaches to just what might qualify as "sound art". That, says curator Sean McCrum, is one of the points the project sets out to make.
"One of the things I wanted to do was to let people experience sound art as a creative phenomenon that is developing very rapidly and very fluidly. When you can see people working in many different ways, it actually generates the question as to what sound art is. It's an area for which we don't quite have critical terms of reference yet, but we are developing them."
The lack of terms of reference is an opportunity rather than a drawback, he reckons. As Kwi says, we should just respond to the work as we find it. One possibly intimidating feature, however, is its technological nature. "Absolutely," McCrum agrees. "Technology is pretty crucial to almost all the pieces. It is work made by people who are technologically very literate. But we have reached the point where the technology is not an end in itself. Now graduates are interested in using their knowledge of the technology to do something creative with it." Nor is the technology all that unfamiliar or exotic.
"Practically everything in the exhibitions," McCrum suggests, "extrapolate from our everyday experience. Most visitors are likely to have things like computers, stereos, iPods and televisions and who knows what other electronic devices, all of them using sophisticated audio and video programs." The visitors have an unusually active - or interactive - role in the exhibitions: "In pretty much all cases, the presence of people triggers the works, and without people they more or less close down. There's another dimension as well, which is that in some cases someone in Limerick will have an impact on what happens in Belfast, and vice versa."
McCrum had worked with Kwi and others before, and had a good sense of how their imaginations work. Kwi, as it happens, is responsible for one of the most beautiful pieces, the title of which is simply too long and complicated to relate, which is not the case with the work itself. It consists of what looks like an expansive, wall-mounted sheet of crumpled foil that vibrates in concord with a mellow, complex soundtrack. In fact, it is the physical vibrations of the speaker that animate the foil, and the sounds include recordings of dolphins in the Amazon. Kwi's other piece is a sound-world on a symphonic scale, which also includes some dolphin chatter along with myriad other natural sounds. It's entirely reasonable, and possible, to do as he says and simply experience the works as you find them.
The two strands of the show are site-specific, though one, as McCrum notes, "is the obverse of the other". That is, the Belfast strand is located entirely in one building (each artist selected a specific space and built work around that space), while in Limerick the locations are spread out across the campus. Pedro Rebelo and Michael Alcorn's collaborative piece Between Two Plates bridges the gap, so to speak. Identical steel plates, oxidised and slightly buckled, are sited at the two locations and linked together electronically. Contact microphones generate sounds via active speakers fitted to the rear of the steel. The plates themselves resemble textural paintings, curiously animated by the unpredictable sound patterns.
Jürgen Simpson's piece at the Ormeau Baths occupies a large room, though it is minimal in terms of its own physical presence. It comprises an array of speaker cones suspended in a grid from the ceiling. As you move around the space sensors pick up your presence and generate sounds. It's simple, and it is fascinating to experience. The effect is that the sound dynamically redefines the architectural space. In a way the space is made and remade as you move around it.
Visual artist Barbara Freeman and composer Paul Wilson had worked together previously, and their SHRDLU also employs the idea of dynamically mapping the space as the visitor moves around. There is an additional, visual focus here, though, in the form of a beautiful, fragmented Perspex cube sculpture. It provides a visual equivalent of the idea of a space defined by sounds. The marriage of audio and three-dimensional sculptural elements is convincingly achieved.
Kieran Ferris's Urban Drones aims to bestow visibility on an overlooked part of the urban fabric: those anonymous, functional but mysterious metal boxes that are situated throughout our cities. Ferris depicts them in a series of paintings, makes a map in which they are highlighted, and finally gives them a voice in the form of their own "music". Composer Gráinne Mulvey, in Parallel Light, a visually ambitious piece, uses programmable lights and projected imagery to create two distinct environments. The presence of the visitor triggers sequences of music recorded on Theremins, those eerie electronic instruments.
Ghost Signals by Anthony Kelly and David Stalling is appropriately ghostly, and it resembles what we have come to expect in the field of sculptural installation, not least because it employs a large number of television monitors scattered across a darkened space. They flicker in and out of life, creating a sense of interaction and expectation. It's atmospherically quite powerful.
As McCrum says, Two Places is hard to categorise and, as Kwi suggests, it is easy to experience. You can wander through it and be consistently interested and diverted. It does manage to occupy, and perhaps to define, an in-between space of its own, in which sound, music, site-specific installation, three-dimensional sculpture, painting and graphics all play a part, but none of them dominate.
"For me," McCrum notes, "nearly every piece has a kind of teasing quality. It invites us to say: What's going on here? And in answering that question for ourselves we get a good idea of where sound art is at the moment."
Two Places, curated by Sean McCrum, is at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, and the University of Limerick until Mar 1
