ON AIR

Peter van Haaften, Michael Montanaro, Garnet Willis

Artwork Description:

The audience speaks into the bells of two horns. Sound is inhaled into an alchemical apparatus. The collected voices become chaotically entangled within the tensile confines of an expanding latex balloon. Trapped inside the captured aether words collide, fragment, and recombine, modulating their contextual and phonetic arrangement. A soundscape of ricocheting voices is perceived, emerging from deep inside the balloon. Over time, the pressure becomes too great and like a sonic capacitor, sound is freed from its reservoir. The valves open. Airborne voices are forced through a series of reflective steel cornets towards an elastic membrane where mechanically induced friction compels the collected voices to incandesce. Behind the pulsating membrane, an iris opens, slowly releasing the luminous voices towards a series of glass lenses and mirrors. From here follows a five-part choral harmony of mirrors that builds into a final cacophonous performance of sound, rhythm and light. NOTE: From our earliest moments in conceiving ON AIR, it was our intention to create an interactive, enveloping spatialized sound composition centered around a series of kinetic sculptures, where the audience's physical interactions would be used as the source of all sound material. Audience vocalizations are intermixed and transmuted in a progressive real-time mystery that manifests in sequential physical phenomena: a rolling narrative of inflating balloons, pulsing membranes and modulated light beams. These enlivened instruments beckon the audience to move physically through the work, to experience an intensely embodied electroacoustic sound composition that is carried on a light beam ricocheting between singing mirrors.

Project Collaborators:

With special thanks to: Martin Marier, Nima Navab, Thierry Dumont, Tatev Yesayan, Carolie Delisle, Dirk Zylstra, Guillaume Fortin, Eureka Lighting, Nichia Corporation, Jean-Michaël Celerier and the OSSIA team. This artwork was made possible through the generous support of MOULIN DE L'IMPRÉVU, Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des Arts de Montréal, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Fonds de recherche du Québec, and Concordia University (Montréal).