ASCENDING / DESCENDING
SONIC SHADOWS

Ascending/Descending Sonic Shadows (2019) is an artist book created by Fayen d’Evie and printer Trent Walter that experiments with print as a medium to translate an embodied score into a tactile reading encounter. Where the ascending score trained attentiveness towards the quietest sound, the book invites readers to feel for the quietest shifts in texture and composition across a page. The book also explores the potential for tactile reading to open pathways for trans-sensory conversation, including between blind and Deaf audiences.

The book alternates between debossed and printed spreads. The debossed spreads were made by translating photographic documentation into a succession of screenprinting films, which were used to expose photopolymer plates that were relief printed to create tactile indentations. The source photographic images, by SFMOMA photographer Don Ross, ascend in vantage point, beginning at the ground floor of the atrium and moving progressively closer to the ultradirectional speakers Fontana fixed on mechanical arms on the oculus bridge. The printed pages are made using the same source photographs, films, and polymer plates as the debossed images, but are printed monotone in Concentrated Blue. While the debossed pages ascend, the interspersed printed pages reverse the sequence, descending from the oculus bridge to the atrium floor. The succession of pages, debossed and printed, meet in the middle, cross over, and continue their path of ascent or descent. The book can be read front to back (following the embossed ascent), or back to front (following the printed ascent), or back and forth (a perpetually circulating ascent or descent).

The films that mediated the translation from photographic to print form were created with dot sizes ranging from 35 to 10 lines per inch, disrupting the image surface at close range. With certain combinations of dot size and image, hallucinatory shimmering is induced. An epistemology of hallucination displaces the evidentiary status of photographic documentation. Following Roland Barthes’ notion of the photograph as a shared hallucination, an image can be engaged with as a conversational frame for the sharing of descriptive memories, counter-memories, imaginative fictions, and speculations.

 Still, whether debossed or printed, each printed image registers marks that index a representation of Fontana’s Sonic Shadows as installed in 2017, and distinct from its debut in 2010, before the expansive renovation of SFMOMA so radically changed the architectural space. Ascending / Descending Sonic Shadows is an archival proposition to conserve kinaesthetic and sensorial memories of a specific installation and experience of Fontana’s work. Conservation here is not the elusive goal of maintaining an object in its original form, but a more nebulous quest to carry forwards memories of ephemeral encounters with artworks, through corollaries, translations, re-descriptions, and discursive echoes.

Ascending/Descending Sonic Shadows (2019). Published by Negative Press in an edition of 30, including 6 Artist Proofs, 6 copies reserved for exhibition, readings, or performance, and 2 copies donated to international braille libraries. Photopolymer relief and embossing with Braille and laser-cut soft cover on BFK Rives 250 gsm (relief and embossing), Ball & Doggett Colourplan 270 gsm (Braille) and Arches HP 300 gsm (soft cover). 29.5 x 23 cm, 48 pages.

Contact Trent Walter at Negative Press for acquisition enquiries, or Fayen d’Evie for exhibition enquiries.