Pete Gorman Heteroclite (2010)

Installation at ROCDA Gallery Dunedin July 2010

Heteroclite was installed as part of BLEND; an art/science group show

Broadcast subversions. The glitch. Post digital backlash. Hardware hacking. Fitful flickering, non-signification. The misuse of technology. Generative, Auto-poetic. The audio is the video is the audio.

Live sound created with hand made audio oscillator circuits and band pass filter responding to light and shadow patterns created by the audio itself. The oscillator’s audio signal is transformed directly to a video signal which in turn is sent to the television via RF modulator. The audio oscillators respond to the images they themselves are creating in an endlessly varying feedback loop.

The work pays homage to the Japanese video artist Yasanao Tone who pioneered the first television powered oscillators in his work Molecular Music (1982) Heteroclite uses a television of the type that that era artists may of used and uses similar audio oscillator circuits and light sensors, deploying the four light sensors in the same position as used in Molecular Music. Like Molecular Music Heteroclite produces live analog sound in response to the patterns on the screen. Analog technology provides an immediacy that is lacking with digitally mediated technologies. Heteroclite takes Tone’s apparatus a step further, the image is abstracted to a pattern generated by the sound itself, is non-representational and the work becomes an auto-poetic self-referencing machine.

Heteroclite 2010

Heteroclite at ROCDA Gallery

Heteroclite video documentation

Heteroclite Reviewed on Eye Contact by Jodie Dalgleish

Of most interest to me is Pete Gorman’s audio-visual sculpture
Heteroclite which he describes as ‘an auto-poetic self-referencing
machine’. In it he pursues the idea of visual sonification first
suggested by the poet Rainer Maria von Rilke in Primal Sound (1943).
He exhorted artists to seek sound ‘in another field of sense’ and the
idea was then made artistically significant by Japanese artist,
composer and performer Yasunao Tone, co-founder of Group Ongaku and an
original member of Fluxus.

With Molecular Music (1982) Tone linked text, image and sound by
projecting Chinese poetry onto a screen to which light sensors were
attached. These sensors interpreted the image as a data stream that,
in turn, activated sound oscillators to which they were also connected
(a certain frequency of signal activated a particular tone).
Heteroclite pays homage to Tone’s pioneering work and similarly relies
solely on analog technology (Tone’s later work uses digital
technology) while taking his idea further to create a continually
self-generating performance system.

The sound signals produced by Gorman’s handmade audio oscillator
circuits are transformed to a video signal that produces flickering
light and shadow patterns on an 80’s vintage TV screen and that,
through light sensors, is transformed by the audio oscillators back
into sound. Droning and flickering in its own anomalous way,
Heteroclite ultimately, idiosyncratically and subversively blends not
only art and science but also systems of perception and communication.

Jodie Dalgleish – 13 July, 2010

Full article : http://www.eyecontactsite.com/2010/07/an-art-science-combination#ixzz0ticogAAm


back to homepage