People,
emotions, ideas, culture, the air, the sea, sound, sight, touch, time –
humans are continually swept up in simultaneous and ceaseless defining
flows. The Galleria Mazzini, Genoa’s elegant 19th Century architectural
gem, serves as the framing space for the installation A PLAY OF FLOWS.
The work’s sonic environment, based on site resonance and the nearby
Mediterranean Sea, initiates a meditation on contributing currents that
enliven this unusual urban site.
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installing
dome speakers (dome peak, 82 feet), October 20
The architecture
features four octagonal dome structures, built of cast
iron and glass, which are equally spaced apart by five arched arcades
built of the same materials. The dome structures and the spaces below
become principal areas for the installation’s sound, which are
frequencies extracted from the roar of the sea as recorded in
Boccadasse, Genoa. The extracted frequencies are exclusively resonant
to
the Galleria itself. The sea is ‘tuned’ to the Galleria. The
Galleria sounds of the sea.
Each dome and the
underlying area constitute a spatial ‘tower,’ The towers feature the
varying
sonic activity of the installation. Three channels of sound per dome
space enable sound to be flown up, down and across each 'tower'
independently. The localized motion of sound creates a volumetric
sense as sound ‘columns’ are manifest under each dome.
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The Galleria Mazzini (592 feet long), c. 1900
| The four sound
columns stand in relation to each other – their individual activities
merge into spatial patterns and progressions that engage the entire
Galleria. Vertical sound motion in the 'column' spaces
resembles the motion inherent to fountains: the nearby monumental
fountain in the Piazza De Ferrari
stands in reference.
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The installation uses more than 1 kilometer of cable
The sounds erupt
and cascade vertically and across the width and length of the Galleria
as the
flow of sound further engages the space via the interplay of resonance
– all sounds resound within the larger space, creating an activated and
regenerative field of site-specific integrated sound.
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