VANISHING POINT 1.1 (1999)

While living in Prague and traveling about Europe I experience the majestic silences (room tone) of many cathedrals, museums, castles and other imposing spaces. I note the sometimes extreme sonic differences between those silences.

For years afterwards I seek out silences and their differences. On a recording of my vocal work DREAMERS, made 12 years earlier in St. Paul's Chapel, I find 1.1 seconds of pure room tone. I transfer this silence to computer for spectral analysis.

I extract the standing waves, the resonance as determined by the size, shape and materials of the space. These isolated frequencies I reconstruct into a series of sonic events.

The events are returned to the chapel as they embody a series of sonic objects and spatial progressions which interact with the architecture. Column-like sonic objects emerge and accumulate. They are raveling-unraveling points of stasis and fields of motion. As localized, discreet wave-objects they stand in relation to the physical space, to each other and to the perceiver.

The installation's re-emergent native audio draws us into a fuller awareness of space and presence - the sense of self in relation to the space. Self-space is reified. The installation confronts aspects of time, perception and being by way of an every day intuitive experience - the sound of spaces.