LET THE WIND SPEAK, LET WATER TURN TO GRAINS OF SAND, INTO GUSTS OF WIND

2023

73.5” x 18” x 30.25” (including plinth; sculpture: 34” tall including bolts, width and depth variable)

Copper plate, acrylic, vinegar, salt, bolts, aural exciters, wood, speaker amplifier, with computer running Max application of sound installation (including audio files) and separate monitor for schematics display

Max/MSP Patch Programmer: Chen Shen

Audio Consultant, Plinth Design: Ken Goerres

This audio-visual installation piece perhaps encapsulates best one of the directions I’m currently exploring and unifies my backgrounds both in visual and in aural artforms. I love working with both a physical material object and the ephemeral (sound and sight as in projection) leading to the questioning of where the art object is, or perhaps what is the Art itself. 

Pursuing the question of breaking the frame visually, from a sound and particularly music perspective I realized that the frame is the start and end points of the piece. This sound piece is constructed as a piece that loops in on itself ad infinitum and yet will rarely, if ever, repeat its exact composition as there are twenty-one layers of randomness built in. The sound fragments primarily consist of field recordings that I’ve gathered or found (mostly of wind and water droplets) which I then morph/distort through electronics into almost ghostly voices (Let the Wind Speak) again returning to the idea of how we name, bend and shape narratives around nature to create a kind of frame or form so that we can better ‘understand’ and comprehend it. Nestled in the fragments as well are fragments of recordings of Thai and Chinese Bells (and Balls), both part of my own cultural heritage.

The piece also plays with the concept of cyclic time—mythical time as opposed to historical time—the entire piece remaining ever transformative, ever in flux—a paradoxical breaking of archetypal myth-making while still caught within it—ouroboros again. The work also is a continuation of my exploration of strata, layered and excavated, while remaining always transitory and is inspired as well by Italo Calvino’s lecture Cybernetics and Ghosts as well as Petrarch’s works and the essay Two Modes of Time and Its Relation with Space in the works of Petrarch by Bili Zhong.