Christopher Grimes Projects is pleased to present Acoustical Visions, an exhibition of works by Bill Fontana, whose work centers on the activation of conscious listening and an awareness of sound qualities and harmonies in everyday life. With the help of evolving acoustic instruments, unfamiliar localization and ambisonic experimentation, Fontana reveals unique characteristics of landscapes, architecture and engineering structures, while creating site specific and immersive sound sculptures.

Fontana creates installations that use sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural settings. His sound sculptures use manmade and natural environments as a living source of musical information. He views music, in the sense of coherent sound patterns, as a process that is constantly present. His methodology has been to create networks of simultaneous listening points that relay real time acoustic data to a common listening locality.

Since beginning his investigations into acoustical environments in 1968, Fontana has produced a large number of works that explore the idea of creating live listening networks. These use a hybrid mix of transmission technologies that connect multiple sound retrieval points to a central reception point. Some conceptual strategies have been acoustic memory, the total transformation of the visible by the invisible, hearing as far as one can see, the relationship of the speed of sound to the speed of light, and the deconstruction of our perception of time.

Inspired by the innate behaviors and primal forces of old growth forests and their critical role of maintaining ecological balance, Fontana investigated the Giant Sequoia and the unfamiliar song from within. The Sequoia in Sequoia National park are over 3000 years old and are the oldest inhabitants of North America. Fontana’s recording expedition consisted of mounting high resolution vibration sensors (accelerometers) to the trunks of these ancient trees. The Kaweah River which emerges from four forks in the Sequoia National Park is heard by reverberations traveling through the ground. This flowing rhythm of moving water echoes in the massive trunks with the resonance of wood.

“It was literally a song of the earth. Global warming and the problems of climate change will be the global environmental pandemic. The only way this will really change is to generate a passionate and informed response in the public.”

Bill Fontana

White Motions evolved from studies of an intense winter storm that swept through San Francisco in January of 2017. A large tree outside the entrance of Fontana’s home had been damaged by the storm resulting in a rupture to the drainage pipes. While guarding his studio from flooding, Fontana used this time to film the slanted motions of the rain. The sounds were captured with accelerometers mounted on the century old steel handrails outside the studio entrance. The resulting sounds emerge as a texturally layered, intimate soundscape that invites perceptual awareness and challenges the historical definitions of noise. Responding to questions of liveness and immateriality through sensory perception experienced in museums, the first edition of White Motions was acquired by SFMOMA in 2017 and is part of their permanent collection which explores sound and time based works as an intervention.

Rudolf Frieling, curator of media arts at SFMOMA notes, “To embrace the multilayered sequencing and spacing of sound-based works in the context of a museum and within an exhibition has been the driving force behind Soundtracks. This analysis of sound as a spatial experience follows a long media-historical trajectory in which environmental acoustics are embraced as social and contextual. The terms ambient and soundscape often synthesize this notion. Researchers Vincent Meelberg and Marcel Cobussen write of the everyday sound of footsteps as ‘the sounds of things to come, the sounds of expectation.’ Registered subconsciously, these sonic impressions work on us and can be addressed as traces that ‘indicate a presence that is at the same time absent. . . . Footsteps are sonic traces of a physical presence, just as they are traces, or perhaps more accurately, expressions of the mental condition and of the possible intentions of the one who walks.’ We always hear before we see.”

Bill Fontana, Desert Soundings Canyon, 2014
Single channel HD video, color, stereo, projection or LED display, 47 minutes, looped
Edition of 5

Desert Soundings Canyon was created as part of a quartet of audio/video works for the Abu Dhabi Festival in 2014. The works explore the hidden voice of the desert with accelerometers buried in the sand dunes revealing that within itself, the desert contained a universe of moving particles and sounds akin to waves on a beach—particles of sand, sliding over each other in a state of perpetual motion. Fontana used macro lenses to bring these micro landscapes into focus which when reproduced to a larger scale, uncover an unseen landscape.  

“I was interested in the resonant properties of certain objects, and how these objects were, in a sense, listening to the world around. That seemed to symbolize how I felt about the act of listening, making music as a physical embodiment of that idea.”

Bill Fontana

Completed in San Fransisco, California, during the global coronavirus pandemic, Graphic Waves reveals a window into Fontana’s work during these months of quarantine, considering how art may continue to provide a source of spiritual nourishment.

“During this Pandemic I have been making many visits to a my favorite acoustical viewing position in San Francisco Bay, on top of a cliff overlooking the entrance of San Francisco Bay with remarkable views of the shapes of expanding wave patterns along the shores of Fort Point. The high overhead view of these patterns as slowly moving repeating graphic lines has a mathematical elegance that for me is a meditative experience. I used the videos to construct a mesmerizing collage suggestive of timelessness. The sound mix is made with high resolution vibration sensors buried in the beach that renders the breaking waves with a resonant quality that also evokes a feeling of timelessness.” -Bill Fontana

"Fontana's sound environments renew our awareness of the places we inhabit and the powerful role sound plays in both our sense of self and memory. Fontana's work is predicated on a sophisticated investigation into how we perceive sounds in the world. He has created a series of compelling projects that subtly treat the interplay between the origins of sounds and the contexts in which we perceive them, causing the viewer to become conscious of himself and his senses as he hears and perceives anew the world he inhabits"

John Hanhardt, Guggenheim Museum

“I began my artistic career as a composer. What began to interest me was not so much the music I could write, but the states of mind I would experience when I felt musical enough to compose. In those moments when I became musical, all the sounds around me also became musical. The act of listening became a way of making music.

My work over the past 50 years has been an ongoing investigation into the aesthetic significance of sounds happening at a particular moment in time. This has led me to create a series of projects that treat the urban and natural environment as living sources of musical information. The evolution of the resulting sound sculptures have taken on an ever increasing structural analysis of how meaningful sound patterns can be revealed as a natural process that is going on constantly.”

Bill Fontana

bill fontana

Bill Fontana is an American composer and artist who developed an international reputation for his pioneering experiments in sound. Fontana uses sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural spaces. Fontana began making sound sculptures in 1968. In a career spanning 50 years, Fontana's sound sculptures use the urban environment as a living source of musical information, all with the potential to conjure up visual imagery in the mind of the listener. He has realized sound sculptures and radio projects for museums and broadcast organizations around the world. Fontana live and works in San Fransisco.

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