Thinking of Paris

 

I stand in solidarity with the people of Paris and France. For me as an artist and like generations of artists before me, Paris has been a source of great inspiration. I have one unrealized media project with the Eiffel Tower and one I realized 21 years ago at the Arc de Triomphe for the 50th anniversay D-Day

- Bill Fontana, San Francisco

 

 

 

(early concept summary for an unrealized Paris dream)

ACOUSTICAL VISIONS OF THE EIFFEL TOWER

Background
My recent sound sculptures have explored how vibration lives within structures as an inner voice.  These works have revealed the sounds Buddhist Temple bells in Kyoto and Tokyo make when they are not ringing as they breath in the ambient sound energy of the surrounding garden into its fundamental resonance.  The Millennium Bridge in London oscillates harmonically from the wind and collective energy of people walking on it or rain falling on it. The Golden Gate Bridge is permeated by the percussive rhythms of traffic on its expansion joints and wind in its cables.  The long silent historic Finnieston Crane in Glasgow quietly breathes in and resonates from the ambient sounds of the River Clyde surroundings and the faint coos of pigeons living in it.

Acoustical Visions
In all of these sound sculptures in addition to the extensive use of  live listening networks of accelerometers,  video cameras gaze at and into a sounding situation  the to reveal something unique about the vibrating energy of the structure.

Project Summary
My proposed project with the Eiffel Tower will consist of designing and installing a network of live accelerometers placed on different parts of the structure to reveal the Tower’s  inner musical voice.  Live video cameras will be placed in several locations that will be both intimate with the sounding structural situation on the Tower and will also slowly rotate as in the video of the Finnieston Crane to reveal the structural geometry of the Tower framing and reframing itself .


The live sounds and videos from the Eiffel Tower will be transmitted to a single or multiple exhibition sites in which the videos will be shown or projected on multiple screens with a multi-channel loudspeaker system.  With all of the sounds and video collected as live data, Acoustical Visions of the Eiffel Tower becomes mobile and can be experienced not only in Paris but other venues worldwide that may be interested in it.

 

Sound Island

Arc de Triomphe, 1994

This site-specific sound sculoture was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and the City of Paris for the 50th Anniversary of D-Day. A network of microphones and hydrophones on the Normandy coast transmitted the live sounds of the sea to a loudapeaker system in the facades of the monument, so that the natural white sound of the sea silenced the traffic noise surrounding the monument. On the observation terrace on the top of the Arc du Triomphe, visitors could hear as far they could see as live sounds from many visible points of Paris were brought there.

Sound Island Review New York Times June 18th, 1994

 

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