1 Forms Of Paper (54:01)
Presqu'une heure de manipulation de pages d'un livre, pièce créée pour l'exposition Art in the Libraries Exhibition...
Los angeles artist steve roden often reconfigures physical objects and spaces in his recordings and installations, in pursuit of 'possible landscapes'. that is, by abstracting objects, architectures and field recordings through electronics, he creates new audio spaces. he refers to his microsonic aesthetic, which at times shares affinities with bernhard gunter's hushed work, as "lower case sound" or "sound concerned with the subtlety and the quiet activity of listening". fittingly, "forms of paper" is an expanded version of a recording initially designed for installation in the los angeles public library which dealt with the materiality of the printed page. all of the sounds on "forms of paper" are derived from the turning and touching of book pages, but the way that they've been processed and reconfigured with protools strips out any obvious sonic hallmarks. what's left is a shifting constellation of crackles, rustles, and static, swirling together eddy upon eddy of clicks into a pouros drone. it's certainly not a vast imaginative leap to imagine these sounds as a sort of sonic metaphor for the surface of paper viewed under magnification, cratered with the natural grain of compressed pulp, littered with dust, and scraped with angled light. Indeed, the narrow scope of roden's conceit contributes the work's success. his philosophical interest is summed up in a quote from hiroshi ogawa: " when you hold a clean immaculate piece of paper, no matter what size it may be cut or folded into, you can find the meaning of its form there. it is clear that the surface of the sheet encloses infinite space." like the object that it takes as its point of departure, "forms of paper" unfolds from a nominally two dimensional plane into a space shot through with hidden depths and cavities, each one a wormhole leading to a realm as full of possibility as silence itself.
The Wire
sold out visit Steve Roden, Line & some photos of the installation
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