We usually think of the camera as an eye and the microphone as an ear... but all senses exist simultaneously in our body.

Bill Viola, Statement, 1985

 

The proposed exhibition comprises of two elements to be shown in two different galleries in Athens and London for a period of two weeks: a multichannel sound installation designed to physically represent composer Alex Tyrrell’s album Memories We Made In The Computer Age will be exhibited in London, and Stop Counting an installation-based sculpture by Karla Black, from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection, will be displayed in Athens simultaneously.

 

The sound work in the gallery in London will be played through directional speakers and recorded live via a microphone. This recording will then play through an amplifier in the gallery space in Athens. The sculpture will be filmed whilst on display and this recording will be played live through a projector at the space in London. A loop is created: a continuous cycle of live feeds. The idea of reciprocity here allows for the works to be re-appropriated by having an original and a facsimile in constant juxtaposition; the viewer is asked to consider seeing and hearing as being integral to one another. An exchange between sight and sound occurs and a union is formed bilaterally between the senses. There is also an interplay of connected and disconnected elements where the audience in both cases is subjected to a continuous shift between the physical and non-physical, challenging the parallel between the evident and the absent.

 

Both works will be in conversation with one other through their non-physical counterpart - a reaction will occur simultaneously whereby the notion of seeing and hearing will at once be antagonised indirectly. Tyrrell’s work seeks to confront normative approaches to composition and live performance by presenting the music in the form of an immersive, spacial sound environment, utilising directional speakers and natural acoustic reflections. Emancipated from the concerns of orchestration and harmonic arrangement, the work problematises the relationship between timbre and space, challenging the listener to explore the physicality of the composition and homogenise the relationship between sound and materiality. This mirrors the tactility of Black’s fingerprint-stained tape which, much like the sound, is represented vertically, mapping the temporal process and instigates a mental restructuring of the space in which it occupies.This provides the work with a notion of the individual whilst also reflecting on the physical process of its production. Stop Counting appears to hover on the border between existence and collapse or on the point of breakdown. The audience is invited to consider the relationship between the use of objects as a means of communicating and our understanding of the world through physical experience.

 

At the space in London the audience will be able to hear the sound work through nine directional speakers whilst a projection of the sculpture in real time will be shown on an opposing wall. In Athens the audience will be able to see the sculpture whilst the live recording of the sound work in London is played through an amplifier placed parallel to the sculpture. The real (physical) and facsimile (non-physical) will be in a state of synchronicity; a joining together of two works which aim to harmonise hearing and seeing, but also antagonise the boundaries between them. In the gallery space, the viewer is already aware of how to see (or hear) the objects from a preconditioned idea of history surrounding spaces for art; “the [gallery] not only conditions, but also overpowers the artworks themselves in its shift from placing content within a context to making the context itself the content.” 

 

By bringing together a physical work in direct comparison with a physically absent work through the means of technology, the exhibition will confront the idea of ‘spaces’ for art and what this means in the contemporary. The uninhabited ‘space’ between Athens and London, a path of networks and data streams that both works will travel through to get to their respective destinations, is hereby interpreted. We see the artwork actively becoming a “coordinator of existing forms” choosing to subtract materials from the environments in which they once made sense, relaying them into new environments to form a new discourse.