edited by Brandon LaBelle, Claudia Martinho – Errant Bodies Press; Pap/Com [book + cd], ISBN: 9780982743904, 304 pages, 2011, English
A historical displacement has radically changed our notions of “local” and “remote” through the embracing of digital networks in our daily life, which are socially – and more so politically – shaping how “we sense where we are”. In this book this displacement is analyzed from the sound artist’s point of view, treated in many different ways through the work of more than twenty artists and theorists using sounds as a dynamic elements which trigger space and architectures to react. Among these are LaBelle’s experiments in “translations” between space and sound (building a replica of a space based only on the sounds of the original space), Nigel Helyer’s combination of sonography and cartography (and other projects centred on the ample theme of locating sounds) and the “evolving” sonic environments of Usman Haque and Robert Davis. There is discussion of the effects of human presence in shaping a space and its architecture, as with the populated ringed walls in van der Heide’s “The Speed of Sound”, alongside the more external approach of Jodi Rose’s vibrating “singing bridges” and the very intimate one of the “Infrasound Series” by Arford and Yau. The immaterial spatiality of sounds meets the very material one of architecture, resonating organic and inorganic structures. Sounds here strategically contribute to define space, hybridizing with it, being either visualized, materialized or at least charted. The heterogeneous nature of the contributions with the attached CD audio constitutes an essential and timely compendium on this topic.