installations

Installation Tour

Always a hit with festival goers and to those just curious, Open Ears’ free installations and audio artworks can be found in a variety of venues across downtown Kitchener. Playful, meditative and thoughtful, they are places to gather, watch, interact and listen. Join us at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery for a tour of this year’s installations and their artists.

The Whispering Room

Whispering Room, 1991, is composed of both audio and film elements, underscoring the shifting ground upon which our concepts of meaning and reality rest. Each of the 16 speakers in this reinstallation plays a different segment of a narrative. The parts come together according to the path that the visitor takes from speaker to speaker. At intervals triggered by the viewer’s movement, an image is projected onto the wall. The gentle murmur of the voices imbues the work with a dream-like quality that is reinforced by the slowed-down speed of the film.

Syncopated Precipitation

A temporary roof structure is placed in the fountain, and water is pumped onto the roof so that it drips off the roof’s edge, as if it is raining. The water drops fall in a rhythmic pattern that is determined by the contour of the ‘drip edge’ of the roof. The musical elements of accelerando and decelerando can be affected by pumping water periodically onto the roof. The water drops fall onto a collection of suspended and amplified metal and plastic objects, forming a playful and rhythmic percussion ensemble. Syncopated Precipitation was developed with a project grant from the Media Arts program of the Ontario Arts Council.

Butterflies (theatre for the ears VII)

Butterflies' experiments with sound ideas of gesture and figure. A stereo audio signal is displayed graphically in an oscilloscope, which represents the two audio channels as X and Y coordinates in Cartesian space. The gestures are basic waveforms produced by various kinds of sound waves - sine waves, saw tooths, square waves, triangular waves, and feedback in various combinations, modulations, envelopes and sweeps. The figures are composed of combinations of these electronic wave forms as displayed on a cathode ray oscilloscope, producing a kind of visual music. The resultant audio-media work has a sense of openness, listening, and flowing movement through a potentially limitless space which belongs wholly neither to the sound nor to the imagination, but it is dependent on both – a place for things just to be and become as they are …

Frequent Mutilations

Four semi-ancient reel-to-reel tape machines play a series of large analog “tape loops” of different durations. A celebration of one of Canada’s longest running audio art programs, Frequent Mutilations, which for close to twenty-five years aired original hour long audio art compositions every Saturday on University of Waterloo’s CKMS FM. The tape loops weave together different sounds and textures to create a slowly evolving composition. Much like the show, there’s no telling what will happen.

Spirit in Sound: Musical Ecology

James Harley has curated a collection of electroacoustic music that explores a range of soundscapes, evoking place and culture in ways realistic and/or fantastical. The music will be presented in the immersive space of the City Hall Rotunda through a multi-channel sound system. Contributors include, among others: Natasha Barrett, Darren Copeland, Luc Ferrari, Charlie Fox, James Harley, Paul Rudy, Gregory Taylor, Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, Frances White and Iannis Xenakis.

Obsolesence

What does it mean to be obsolete? Obsolescence —a sound installation, is a response to the ever-evolving manner in which music reaches us.

Over the last century the function of the home piano has shifted from one of the main sources of home entertainment to being displaced by electronic keyboards and home speaker systems, leaving the piano as a curiosity — an ornamental antique piece of music technology. Now the loudspeaker functions as the central audio interface in home entertainment but will it—in time— be superseded by the next piece of technology?

In Obsolescence the roles of an antique upright piano and loudspeakers are exchanged. The loudspeaker is positioned as an antique ornament through which the voices of pianists are heard, and the piano evolves from an ornamental piece of furniture to a transducer by which other sounds are made —not by it, but on it and through it.

Expressions 34: A Celebration of Student Art from Waterloo Region

Art inspired by our sound environment

Created in conjunction with the Waterloo Region School Board’s art teachers