2017
Fifteen-point-source, site-specific sound installation
Noise Melody: 4′16″, repeating
Foam-core panels, surface exciters, relay sequencer and environmental sound field
MemoryLab
March 9–April 16, 2017
HistoryMiami, Miami, Florida
“My memory of what happened is not what happened.”
—John Cage, Composition in Retrospect
Memory Study for Surrounded Space (2017), 4′16″. Complete repeating Noise Melody used in the installation. This stereo presentation does not reproduce its movement among the fifteen sounding panels.
Memory Study for Surrounded Space considers memory as an unstable process rather than a faithful record. The work draws upon recordings supplied by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives.
From this material, I selected short audibles drawn largely from recordings connected to Miami and Florida—speeches, interviews, news reports, home movies and other archival sources. The fragments were chosen primarily for their sonic qualities: the grain and cadence of a voice, the character of a microphone, the acoustics of a room, or sounds occurring around the recorded event.
Removed from their original contexts and composed into a 4′16″ Noise Melody, the audibles no longer provide enough information to reconstruct a continuous historical account. Nevertheless, traces of place remain. Voices, accents, recording technologies and environmental sounds combine to form an unstable, discontinuous portrait of Miami and Florida—something resembling the way memory preserves fragments while rearranging their relationships.
The installation consisted of fifteen four-foot-square foam-core panels suspended within a grid of aircraft wire. Designed and installed with Freddy Jouwayed, the structure formed an enclosure through which visitors could walk. I attached a surface exciter to each panel, turning every panel into a discrete sound source.
A custom relay sequencer activated the exciters like independent noise gates. The Noise Melody traveled continuously from panel to panel along a predetermined but deliberately nonsequential trajectory. Underneath it, separate signals distributed underwater shrimp, flowing Everglades water and the interior sound of a helicopter cabin across selected panels, producing a continuous environmental bed over which the archival fragments moved.
Because the two layers operated independently, their relationships continually changed. Voices and historical fragments appeared at different locations within the structure, momentarily emerging from and disappearing into a surrounding field of environmental sound.
The installation operated continuously during museum hours and was turned on each morning and off at closing.
EXHIBITION
Memory Study for Surrounded Space was commissioned for MemoryLab, organized by HistoryMiami and the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives at Miami Dade College, and curated by Kevin Arrow and Barron Sherer of Obsolete Media Miami.
CREDITS
Concept, composition, sound-system design and installation: Gustavo Matamoros
Architectural installation and lighting: Freddy Jouwayed
Custom relay sequencer and audio hardware: Claudio Rodriguez
Archival source material: Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives
Photographs: Gustavo Matamoros