Reflections

Throughout Resonant Spaces, environmental conditions specific to each site played an essential role in shaping visitors’ experience and the reception of the works in the exhibition. Each artist addressed these environmental conditions by engaging with several emergent strategies: integration, immersion, restriction, and disruption. Swartz and Lucier produced installations that aimed to integrate with the sonic and visual environments of their choses sites. Kirkegaard and Maes created works that enveloped the listener, transforming the spaces into concert-like environments that demanded attention and were inescapable. Sun Kim and Rowland created works that required the restricted environment of the gallery, both sonically and visually, in order to provide space for audiences to engage meaningfully with their installations. For instance, experiencing Christine Sun Kim’s subtle and introspective works demands the visitor’s own auditory imagination, and presenting these works in a busy public space would be, in my perspective, disastrous. Fontana, in contrast, presented a work that imagined the metal structure affixed to the Life Sciences Center as a giant musical instrument. The sounds at times disrupted the soundscape outside the building to create an altogether new sonic environment. It is beyond the scope of this essay, but I suspect that artists working with light may have similar strategies for engaging with ambient environmental conditions, which play an equally crucial role in the reception of their work.

Among the sound-generating works in Resonant Spaces, the sonic materials employed varied significantly, yet the artists’ approaches to organizing and shaping these sounds often utilized similar techniques—among them repetition, drone, periods of silence, and continual syncopation—to achieve a sense of timelessness. The result is sound that distances itself from normative qualities of music, and instead contributes to the atmosphere and infuses the background sounds of an environment to create something more akin to ambient music.¹⁹

Together these sonic qualities reflect the constraints of perceptual minimalism through the limiting of sonic materials within site-specific conditions, allowing visitors to engage with a work as a singular and observable phenomenon. In this way, sound art most closely relates to light art: both sound and light can behave as carriers of information, such as video or music projection, but both can also operate as the subject itself—as when James Turrell projects a single color, or Alvin Lucier produces a single tone. The sound or light becomes the focal point for an experience outside, inside, or around it.