Laura Maes: Spikes

Artist Laura Maes often explores how physical objects interact, and how an object sounds in relation to physical or electrophysical interaction with environments and visitors. For example, in her solo exhibition Sounding Sound Art (2013), a series of refrigeration pipes cooled air to produce condensation, which then fell onto amplified glass plates suspended below the pipes. The simple physical interaction between these elements created the sound work. Repetition of this phenomenon with multiple units played a key role in generating complexity from Maes’s simple means, and the result was both predictable and varied. Yet, over time, this complexity created a drone-like texture that is both hypnotic and sonically arresting.

In Spikes (2017, fig. 9), light was an essential component of the work at different stages. Maes employed two hundred custom circuit boards affixed to five sets of copper rods powered by solar panels affixed to the outside of the building. The artist designed each circuit to be individually distinct yet functionally the same by varying the circuits’ components and, most importantly, by employing different kinds of sound emitters, to which she affixed an array of washers and nuts to alter the acoustic sound. A variable resistor in the form of a photocell included in each circuit responded to ambient light conditions, introducing randomness into the timing cycle of the circuits, which emitted a click sound and brief flash of light from an LED when activated. Likewise, changes in daylight directly affected the loudness, speed, and synchronicity of the system. The entire work was situated in a small, closed room that serves as a second entrance to the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth. With the entryway’s low ceilings, visitors were quite close to the circuits, and one could discern the spatial effect of each circuit as well as a cumulative effect of the whole, since the room was lively and reverberant. Visitors likened the work to listening to tree frogs in the spring, or crickets in late summer, and every now and then passersby would interrupt the soundscape with their travels.