A Sound That Never Was is a multi-channel sound installation curated by The Dim Coast (jake moore & Steve Bates). It features sound by 14 artists; Félicia Atkinson, Matthew Cardinal, Raven Chacon, crys cole, Isabella Forciniti, David Grubbs, Timothy Herzog, Sasha J. Langford, Mani Mazinani, Christof Migone, Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt, Anju Singh, Aho Ssan, Mark Templeton, voice recording by Vivian Darroch-Lozowski, and text by Daniela Cascela.
This project began as an encounter with the book Voice of Hearing, written by Vivian Darroch-Lozowski, first published in 1984. The sensorial slippage of its title and how the reader is brought into being in the hearing-reading of its text suggested the form for this project.
A Sound That Never Was is produced with a new digital instrument that generates a score writ from software code modulated by weather data and seismic activity. The score parses the library’s sound files authored by this chorus of artists, played out in arrangements determined by the vibrancy of the world in a particular place at the moment of their selection. The precise arrangements, understood as relationality between the world, the machines of production, transmission, reception, locality, and the artists' original gestures - perform a sound that never was before and never will assemble exactly thus again.
Along with their sounds, each artist contributed metadata that allows the instrument to analyze this information alongside incoming weather data. While the sounds are ever-present, their audition and composition are made possible via coded, roaming apertures associated with atmospheric conditions.
The invitation to the artists was to contribute something; a sound, a gesture, in relation. But also, to leave something out so that no offering was itself an enclosure. To allow other sounds to come into its authorial space. In this way, the artists create apertures within their own works, space for these overlapping, conversational sounds sometimes in consonance and sometimes in dissonance, not seeking homogenous connection or tunings but radical openness to what might become. This generosity makes clear that it is most often external conditions that allow for perceptions of harmony to occur.
Textures, timbres, tones, rhythms, faint-almost-unheard melodies, sounds equally felt and not heard. Accidental and relational harmonics, overtones, spaces, silences.
The pluri-vocality of the project is influenced by the key idea of Vivian’s text; that there is a ‘voice of hearing’. A voice of hearing is the resonant manifestation of relationship within an interconnected, complex, atmospheric, layered world whose correspondences and influences are both known and unknown. It is also one that considers feeling and sensing as forms of knowledge, not confirmations of, nor methodologies toward, rationality. In this way, the works do not privilege hearing as audition, but asserts vibrancy and relation as key to reception.
Alongside speakers installed specific to their site of exhibition, corresponding objects like weather balloon(s) that resonate with the sound outputs informed by the distinction of the built environment, will allow A Sound That Never Was to come into being.