Briefly: What'll it be like?
Like walking through the abstracted amalgamation of 30 storms, water shaken by thunder, light bouncing off pools.
In more detail:
Who is this person?Seth is an American sound artist who is real keen to explore relationships between sound, light and space; how sound and light wave propagation differ. I wrote a thing for a John Butcher CD which applies here, so I'm going to be lazy and just include it in toto:
As you and I know, sound is relational. It doesn't travel in the straight lines of Euclidian geometry, from A to B like a train or your plumbing. It propagates, like a gas. Sound leaks round corners, is focused by curves, travels at different speeds through metal, stone or water. It articulates space and time. Unlike light, which to all intents and purposes is instantaneous, sound moves slowly enough for us to understand.
I think that these distinctions and differences apply to Seth and his work, but brought together and synthesised: how do you look at sound and image, but rather than think of them as separate, consider them cojoined in some way.
What's happening hear?Field recordings Seth made of a summer's lightning storms are mixed with thin sine tones that have been tuned to the gallery space. Video projections of heavy rain on shallow water are bounced of similarly shallow water in specially built metal trays, shaken by the sound of thunder. The gallery will be almost completely dark, save 3 bright rectangular pools about an inch deep. The light coming from the pools is a video loop of a puddle during a rainstorm.
Why's it interesting?It's a beautiful, physical experience that not only reaches out to think about sound and image captured from one source, but also considers their physical effects in real time. Trays of water will be shaken, vibrate and create standing wave patterns as a direct result of what we hear; images of similar things happening to a puddle during a storm will be refracted and bounced around the space due to the vibrations of the water.
