RESONANT SITES

Chris Fortescue

12th July - 23rd August 2008 | CCAS Gorman

I was interested in producing something on the edge of audibility, something to be listened through rather than listened to, something more like a tuning fork than a piece of music. Something open to infection and disruption and change from without. In Gorman House there’s a constant low level mid-range hiss from the air conditioning and an irregular, looping, low frequency hum from the passing traffic, overlayed by voices from inside and outside, the activity of office machines, telephones etc – a combination of continuous sound, repetitive patterns with different temporalities, and intermittent single instance bursts of various intensity and duration. To activate this low-level sonic ambience, the characteristic timbre of the main gallery at Gorman House, and bring it forward into consciousness in a subtle way, Resonant Sites uses a low amplitude continuously sounding chord complex made up of sine tones harmonically related to the room’s resonant frequencies. I thought of it as a kind of passive harmonic filter through which environmental ambient sound could be drawn into the work, so that intrinsic and extrinsic elements became convoluted.

In formulating the work for Gorman House, I was interested in activating the transitional zones between hearing and touch, between conscious and unconscious perception, the real and the illusionary, the understood and the not understood. I'm entertained by the notion that we are all world receivers tuned to a certain narrow range of frequencies, and that paradoxically it is our mechanism and action of reception which constructs the world to be received, floating as it might be on a sea of absolutes. (Chris Fortescue, 2008)

Image: Chris Fortescue, Absolutism, 2007,