The group show that closed yesterday at the Vancouver, Washington, art gallery Archer was titled Vantage, and it focused on “perspective – visually, contextually, and perceptually,” according to its brief description at the gallery’s website, at clark.edu. Among the pieces in the exhibit was Greg Pond‘s interactive sound sculpture “That Intricate Never,” as shown in this detail of a photo from Pond’s own site, gregpond.blogspot.com:
Writes Jeff Jahn of the piece at the great Portland art blog portlandart.net:
Whereas, Tennessean Greg Pond’s sound sculpture, “That Intricate Never”, consist of two condenser mics and an octagonal array of speakers on a stand plus some other hardware in a fur trimmed wooden box. Here the piece is actually monitoring the sounds the gallery visitors make as they walk about. For example, a sharp clap of the hands was digitally reversed and rebroadcast 30-40 seconds after the intial event. It produces the oddly dystopian feeling of being monitored. A familiar feeling these days.
The description on the Archer Gallery site is as follows:
Greg Pond’s (Sewanee, Tennessee) sculpture shapes the ambient sound of the exhibition using constructed objects and the architecture of the building itself by reflecting, obstructing, amplifying, or attenuating certain sounds depending on their wavelength and volume. Pure Data, an open source programming environment, processes sounds and projects them back through speakers, expanding and compressing the sense of space and altering our experience of the place.
Here’s to hoping that Pond’s piece gets shown more widely in the near future.