Site-specific collaborative installation with Larry Cressman
Eight-channel sound distributed through 300 piezoelectric speakers
InterMIX 3 Installations Festival
Centre Gallery, Miami-Dade Community College, Wolfson Campus
August 5–28, 1992
Improvisation (1992) | 9′53″ | Binaural documentation excerpt recorded in the Centre Gallery using microphones borrowed from Russell Frehling. Audio recording © 1992 Gustavo Matamoros. Subtropics Editions.
ABOUT IMPROVISATION
Improvisation was my first collaboration with visual artist Larry Cressman. I had met Larry through my then-wife, the visual artist Kate Rawlinson, and was immediately drawn to his work and approach. As curator of InterMIX, I selected him as my collaborator and obtained funding to bring him to Miami for the project.
We improvised upon materials Larry had selected as marks and lines with which to draw three-dimensionally in the gallery. These included glass, inner-tube rubber, sticks from local vegetation covered with graphite, and liquid graphite applied directly to transparent glass and allowed to run downward until it found its own stopping place. The glass—jalousie-window slats of different sizes—and some of the inner tubes were donated by local businesses.
My materials became part of this visual vocabulary: black speaker wire, black electrical tape, and 300 piezoelectric speaker elements with black plastic rims. Small glass squares were cut and taped together around the piezoelectric disks, helping the elements project sound more efficiently. I recorded Larry scoring the glass and isolated short audible gestures from those actions. The sounds were used largely as recorded; their simple differences and their interaction were enough to produce a rich sound world.
A computer program generated MIDI notes that triggered different samples in an eight-channel sampler. Successive events were distributed among eight channels of amplification, each feeding approximately forty speaker elements scattered throughout the gallery. The precise location of any one speaker was not important. What mattered was establishing the conditions through which the sound could manifest its own spatial behavior.
The long runs of speaker wire were necessary for reaching all 300 elements, but there was no reason to conceal them. I left enough wire for Larry to move the speakers and cables as needed, incorporating them into his drawing. Wires extended above and below the glass, rubber, and graphite-covered sticks, responding visually to the other lines and materials throughout the installation.
The gallery walls formed something like a spiral, and the work followed them around the entire space. Slight differences among the speakers, their coupling to the glass, and the transient and scraping character of the recordings produced a dense audio theater that resembled the collective movement of insects or birds. I was not composing particular paths for the sounds to follow. My aim was to construct the system and listen to what its design produced.
The installation operated continuously during gallery hours and could be stopped simply by turning off the amplifiers.
Improvisation led to two further collaborations with Larry: Powerlines, created for the lobby of the Power Center for the Performing Arts in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Field, installed at the Center Gallery in Bowling Green, Ohio. Each became its own site-specific work.
REVIEW
INTERMIX 3 INSTALLATIONS FESTIVAL BROCHURE
