Ascending Sonic Shadows (2010) BY BILL FONTANA, SFMOMA, 19 July 2017

about the encounter

On the afternoon of 19 July 2017, a Wednesday when SFMOMA’s galleries are closed to the public, artist Fayen d’Evie and U.C. Berkeley literary professor Georgina Kleege led a small group of museum staff and invited guests through an ascending encounter with Sonic Shadows (2010) by Bill Fontana.

Sonic Shadows (2010) samples and layers the active movements of visitors and processes that undergird the working museum but are normally concealed from the public. Live signals are fed from accelerometers to eight loudspeakers and four ultrasonic emitters, mounted on mechanical arms on SFMOMA’s fifth-floor oculus bridge. Most of the accelerometers are fixed to pipes in the museum boiler room, relaying real-time fluctuations in flows of water in pipes of varying size and shape. A few are installed on the steel truss oculus bridge to react dynamically to the resonant vibrations of visitors’ footsteps. The mechanical arms rotate the ultrasonic emitters, such that directional sound bounces off surfaces and around the atrium void.

Among those who visited the debut installation of Sonic Shadows in 2010 was architect Chris Downey: “Stepping into the SFMOMA atrium, we were greeted by strange sounds of dripping water, metallic pings, and intermittent clicks. Just as we thought we might recognize a sound, it vanished. Sometimes it seemed to travel right past, while others seemed to swerve somewhere near… Most interesting to those of us without sight was the way the ultrasonic beams bouncing off the walls demonstrated the shape of the architecture we could not see...’ [1]

In July 2017, Sonic Shadows was reinstalled at SFMOMA for Soundtracks, the museum’s first large scale group exhibition exploring sound in contemporary art. The exhibition promised perceptual opportunities for discovering the museum’s new extension, which dwarfed the original building, nearly tripling gallery space, and transforming SFMOMA into the largest museum of modern art in the United States.

The ascending score that d’Evie proposed for the July 2017 encounter was based on echolocation exercises that train attention towards the quietest sounds. She asked those gathered in the atrium to listen for the loudest sound, to tune into its shape and intensity, then put that sound aside and listen for the next loudest, and so on, and so on, until finally they were listening to the quietest sound of all. This process was repeated over five levels, rising from the atrium floor to the fifth-floor oculus bridge. After each listening meditation, d’Evie passed around an audio field recorder, and invited the group to describe sounds they had heard. The cumulative, polyphonic recording is offered here as an ekphrastic echo of the ascending encounter, voiced by Devon Bella, Chris Downey, Robin Clark, Jill Sterrett, Megan Brian,Tanya Zimbardo, Martina Haidvogl, Don Ross, Fayen d’Evie, and Georgina Kleege.

The audiodescriptive recording revealed that the expansion of SFMOMA’s architecture, and the mechanics supporting the functioning of the new building, had vastly changed the listening experience of Fontana’s Sonic Shadows. In the wake of the perceptual displacements exposed by the ascending score, the curatorial team asked Fontana if a new title or year ought to have been attributed to the 2017 re-installation. Fontana insisted on staying with the original, leading Zimbardo to conclude that Sonic Shadows “was much more open of a score than we had imagined.”