World construction, variation: empty vessel

Beschreibung
"This variation of the world construction series is a large scale sound installation which opened at The May Space in New Orleans on October 11, running through November 23, 2013.
The venue is fitted with a total 98 loudspeakers mounted on the walls and ceiling, forming an acoustic skin to the industrial hall, creating a fully immersive listening environment.

Vernazza, Italy, is a small village in the Cinque Terre region, situated on the rugged Ligurian coast. The town’s church, Santa Margherita d’Antiochia, built in 1318 directly on the harbor, opens its entrance to the main square Piazza Marconi with cafes and access to the town beach. When i visited the church in the summer of 2005, its door was wide open, inviting all the everyday noises from outside: the chatter of people sitting in the cafes, the yelling of market vendors, children’s noises of playing at the beach, etc. And all those noises would be captured, reflected and transformed by the church hall’s architecture to become a wonderfully sweet and unholy turmoil of sound occupying the large space, only most vaguely reminding of the noises’ external origins.

My work for The May Space considers the exhibition space as a large empty vessel to resonate from noise leaking in from the outside. The title is a reference to Alvin Lucier‘s work Empty Vessels, which amplified the resonances that were created within empty bottles due to outside sounds. My project appropriates sounds from The May Space’s environs, filters, transforms and projects them into the exhibition space, using loudspeaker arrays and taking advantage of architectural structures on site. It creates spatially distributed listening situations that work independently or, at times, in unison."
Thomas Grill, Werkbeschreibung, Homepage des Komponisten, abgerufen am 05.12.2023 [https://grrrr.org/arts/projects/wcon/wcon-3/]

Uraufführung
11. Oktober 2013 - New Orleans (Vereinigte Staaten)