Ur-sound
Or, the noise no writing can store
Mitchell Akiyama
January 20 – February 21, 2012
Regular hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am-6pm
Join us for the opening on Friday, January 20 from 8pm to 12am.
Rainer Maria Rilke imagines running the needle of a phonograph along the coronal suture of a skull, an act he believes might release a primal sound, a phonographic inscription scrawled across the bones that had, until then, remained hidden and mute. The eighteenth century German physicist, Ernst Chladni discovers that acoustic vibrations cause patterns to form in the sand strewn across a metal plate, the delicate arabesques suggesting sound has a misunderstood materiality. Thomas Edison, slightly hard of hearing despite his young age, sits at his desk and bites down on the wooden mount supporting his prototype for a machine that can both record and play back sound. The bone structure of his teeth, jaw, and cranial cavities amplify the vibrations and restore some of the hearing that his ears no longer provide. Similarly, Ludwig van Beethoven, now all but deaf, bites into a wooden rod attached to the soundboard of his piano, accessing the tactile sonority of the instrument. Twentieth century seismologists convert the raw data of the movement of tectonic plates into sound in order to better understand the power of earthquakes. The quiet shivering of the earth occasionally displays a jagged spike on a computer screen, an event that sounds like a bomb. Continue reading
Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario (CPAMO) 
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