"Vanishing Point" is a site-specific sound installation that is currently on view at the Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley, California) as part of their MATRIX program of contemporary art. As is described below, the piece works both physically and conceptually with the space of the Museum. In contrast to much of the high tech and sound art work presented nowadays, "Vanishing Point" is a relatively low-key piece that alternately occupies and recedes from the exhibition space in a perpetually shifting manner. Information about the work along with other projects in the MATRIX program can be found at the Berkeley Art Museum's web site at http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. Documentation of Vanishing Point can be found at http://www.roving.net/installations/vanishingpoint.html. The piece will be up through May 13. A description of the piece is provided below as is the press release from the Berkeley Art Museum. ------------ Vanishing Point (2001) Vanishing Point is a site-specific sound installation and made for the windows of the main space of the Berkeley Art Museum. It is in part a response to Robert Irwin's "Untitled" (1969), which is part of the Museum's permanent collection. Irwin's piece is one of a series of disc paintings that he produced in answer to the self-posed question, "How do I paint a painting that doesn't begin and end at the edge?" The painting articulates a limnal state in which its contours appear always in flux. Using that piece as a point of reference, Vanishing Point uses sound in the space of the Museum windows to articulate similar terrain - one in which the beginning and end points of audio events are unclear and one in which sounds hover though a series of intermediary states. The audio content of the pieces is a series of chords and pitch relationships derived from the measurements of the windows. The chords drift from one into another via slow arcing glissandi. This transformation takes place over the course of several minutes, so that the gradually shifting states between the two chords can be heard in an extended manner. The sound in each of these transformations fades in just after the glissandi have started and fade out just before the pitches for the target chord are reached. Thus the actual chords that articulate the space of the piece are themselves not heard, but their presence is clearly implied. Built from plain sine tones, the chords are hard to localize in space and their physical source appears to shift depending on the location of the listener. The sounds are played through special drivers attached to the windows so that the glass panes of the windows themselves function as speakers. This allows the piece to be heard both inside and outside the building as it turns the architectural space into a sounding body that acoustically articulates its own vanishing point between interior and exterior. � 2001 Ed Osborn All Rights Reserved --------------------- Berkeley Art Museum Press Release: Ed Osborn/MATRIX 193 Vanishing Point Artist uses museum building as speakers in new site-specific sound installation March 18 through May 13, 2001 - Oakland-based sound artist Ed Osborn will use low-tech gadgetry to turn the UC Berkeley Art Museum into a sound sculpture as part of his site-specific installation Vanishing Point. The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum is proud to present Osborn's work as part of its acclaimed MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art. Ed Osborn/MATRIX 193 Vanishing Point will open at the museum on Sunday, March 18, and run through Sunday, May 13, 2001. Originally trained as a composer in traditional forms of music, Osborn made the transition to installation art ten years ago as his interests began to outstrip the possibilities of conventional composition. Today he creates mechano-acoustic sculptures - sculptures that, when activated, make a noise - using such mundane, everyday items as fishing rods, model trains, music boxes, rubber tubing, and electric fans. Despite their low-tech origins, Osborn's works deal in a sophisticated array of sound-related physics, including shadow audio images, transduced movements, sounding ghosts, inaudible artifaces, sonic depictions and ultrasound sensings. The content of his works, however, deliberately draws upon the types of sounds and experiences that are part of our everyday lives. Osborn's intention is that his audience need not possess a complex understanding of how his sculptures work in order to appreciate them. In essence, Osborn's sculptures transform one form of energy into another - for example, motion into sound. In earlier works such as Swarm (1998) he combined electric fans with ultrasound sensors that were triggered by the movement of people throughout the gallery space, switching the fans on and off in apparently random patterns. In Night-Sea Music (1998) Osborn made a wall of rubber tubes that undulated like seaweed as operetta was played through the small music boxes to which they were attached. Unlike these works, Osborn's installation for the UC Berkeley Art Museum, Vanishing Point, will not have a conspicuous sculptural element. Instead the installation uses a series of small speaker drivers attached to windows in the museum's galleries, magnifying and transmitting the vibration of the glass to people both inside and outside museum. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! 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