To be transported via technology has become a novel concept, perhaps most recently realized with advancements in virtual reality, like the metaverse. But Fontana offers this experience earnestly.
Bill Fontana’s “Acoustic Time Travel,” 2013. Bill Fontana’s sound sculptures are a mechanism for transporting listeners across time and space. The six audio pieces and accompanying videos in the artist’s solo exhibition “Sonic Visions,” at bitforms gallery SF, feature field recordings from the Golden Gate Bridge to the inside of a particle accelerator.
The eight-channel audio installation, “Sequoia Trees River Echoes,” 2019, permeates throughout the atrium of Minnesota Street Project, where bitforms is housed, creating an expansive sonic experience even before visitors enter the gallery. It reminded me of Cage’s seminal 1952 composition “4’33,”” which consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of rests, focusing the audience’s attention on whatever ambient sound bubbles up.
The main gallery features four pieces presented on video monitors and headphones. In some of these, the audio portion predates the video by decades, offering Fontana’s own visual response to a previously acoustic-only work. One example is “Landscape Sculpture with Foghorns,” 2021, which features video of the Golden Gate Bridge set to a 1981 recording of the foghorns. This is the piece that most resembles traditional instrumentation; the horns sound like a soloist repeating a single note.
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