Proximal: Interwoven Spaces and Shared Frequencies (january 12 - february 14, 2025)
Occurring continually at Kunstraum LLC and Art Cake, Proximal: Interwoven Spaces and Shared Frequencies presents intermedia artworks by Carlos Franco, Chuqiao (Chloe) Li, Anna Schimkat, and Elli Fotopoulou. In a radical attempt to contextualize the fragments of noise as overlooked spatial environments and thriving cultural milieu, the exhibition presents sound sculptures, a recorded sound composition, multimedia works, site-specific installations, and a performance piece that speak to this channel of subtle sensory perception as a threshold where meaning emerges. While aspects of the works will include noise in its more traditional sonic forms – white noise, clashes – they were also selected to present noise in such a way that heightens its space-making qualities and its ability to either eclipse or reveal. In doing so, the exhibition elevates the material texture of these ambiances.
The conception of noise is often consigned to the emptiness of forgotten time, space, and histories, to what is unusable or disruptive, or to the humdrum of routine. To the perfectly curated playlist, murmuring sounds of voices always seem to reach the level of music and overtake it. Or to the silent indoor oasis, the screeching and loud shouting on the street become another soundtrack constantly playing from the unshut window – such as with John Cage’s opening of doors to his performances to capitulate his curiosity for background noise that blurred boundaries between exterior and interior.
From its inception, noise was thought to be confusing and disharmonic. Jacques Attali consistently probes the notion that music is the authorization of noise; and Max Weber thought of western music as a stretch of the emergence of rationalization then leaving noise within the space of the senseless. In Michel Serres literary work The Parasite noise is the intruder to the host. The negating potential of noise is more traditionally its key portent. The desire for its imperceptibility leaves it many times invisible as it recurrently buzzes along, faintly intervening in transience. As such, bridging worlds, noise is a beckoning amidst margins and proximity.
Carlos Franco’s site-specific multimedia installation 00:0_ (2020 – 2025) evocates a reversal of perception and stages how digital noise and the minute may affect our conceptions of space and connection. In the installation, a projection of digital videos chosen at random by a custom programmed media player to the front of the viewer, as well as sound heard from stereo speakers transmitting sonic noises, alternate between active and silent. In effect, randomization is determined within the media player by a value of inhibition balancing its output. Beyond a linear storyline, each micro-video’s fragmentary nature disorients just as noise draws attention elsewhere. The videos and auditory combinations were assembled by cutting and interweaving material derived from online ads, social media posts, and viral content. With percussion-heavy sound sampling while also presenting a mnemonic of digital noise, the installation suggests a restructuring of perception in and of digital space with scraps of the previous videos’ forms. Produced on the artist’s mobile device, each video furthers the idea of an expanded understanding of what noise may constitute, how it is experienced, and how it may influence.
Elli Fotopoulou’s interactive sound sculptures in Cytoskeleton Bridge (2024) present a transmission of two different sound emitting objects that through their unpredictable, raw, and noisy presences, allude to an interconnectedness through destabilized physics and matter. The iron Newton’s cradle, fabricated in the shape of a fossilized dolphin spine, with strings holding each vertebra, symbolizes compressed cosmic energy over time. Both an Earthly anatomical skeletal instrument and an articulation of the third law of gravity, this work produces fragmentary sonic resonances transmitted through contact mics and which is playable by the audience. The iron crater also vibrates by touch to produce an irregular and chaotic sound. Raised above the ground, the orifice transmits a clamorous discordance. From one place to another is not only a transmission; the physicality of noise is perhaps dispersed and intermittent as materiality of the iron sculptures is also suggestive of former industrial landscapes, urban noise.
Chuqiao (Chloe) Li’s multimedia work In the Spring Breeze (2024) introduces the audience to her reflection on the Chinese square. Her work is a contemporary symbol of the former prevalence of Tiananmen Square protests and an invitation to contemplate the happenings occurring, and which could occur, on the public stage, a common space and a municipal square. The work’s parameter is formed with two sets of five fans positioned on opposite edges of an equally sided raised platform. They are connected through fishing wires from one fan to the other, which also have been forged with photo transfers on vellum that when propelled by the fans create an understated sonance of white noise suggestive of a distant reverberation reaching the listener, such as leaves rustling in the wind or an indescribable extraneous echo. The underside of the piece is luminated by flashlights and lights from above creating a multiplicity of the shape of the vellum through shadows on the wall. Static noise along with the blurriness of the square produced by the translucent velum present calmness yet allude to censorship created by technology and which is controlled by the state. The murmurous whispering is emblematic of past collective action that now seems dwindled and quiet.
Anna Schimkat’s site-specific installation and performance Water (2025) present the artist’s investigation into the underwater sonic environments of Europe’s rivers such as the Danube and Rhine River as well as Venice’s canals. Presented as a listening station, the sound piece is an accumulation of recordings chronicled with a hydrophone, a microphone that picks up noises from all directions while submerged in aqueous conditions, and mixed to create a binaural composition experienced through headphones. In this work, the feedback registered with the hydrophone is telling of the human impact on ecosystems existing beneath the surface. The inclination to trace underwater sounds began with recollection of the Undine figure, or siren, such as the mermaid Isa or the Danube woman while the war in Ukraine deteriorated gender roles to women as simply wives. The piece expands upon recordings of the noises heard underwater, which encompass a cacophony of bubbling and dripping, clattering ships in the background, and the sound of cars and trams above ground seeping into the underwater soundscape. At the same time, these are accompanied by voices conveying relationships between family members calling attention to care and repair.
Through different works in the show the audience is invited to see and hear the atmospheric qualities of noise – by way of its seeming disconnection, we understand it as another realm of the present. And, while experiencing the space that noise ensconces it may be void of composition, a non-place. However, through its many forms, the exhibition aims to raise consciousness of these worlds.