R7D_Final Fontana Commission Meeting PPP 12_13_17City of Miami Beach SoundScape Park Art in Public Places Recommendation City of Miami Beach Commission Meeting December 13, 2017
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SoundScape Park Site Plan
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Bill Fontana “I am obsessed with precision. It is the only way to do my work.”
One of the world’s leading sound artists, Bill Fontana has installed site-specific public art works at iconic locations in many of the world’s great cities, museums and sites, including
the following:
Sound Island, Arc De Triomphe, Paris (1994)
Harmonic Bridge, Tate Modern, London (2006)
Acoustical Visions of the Golden Gate Bridge, SFMOMA, San Francisco (2012)
Soaring
Echoes, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, Chicago (2012)
Sonic Mappings, MAXXI Contemporary Art Museum, Rome (2014)
Shadow Soundings, MAAT, New Contemporary Art Museum, Lisbon (2017)
In a body of work spanning over four decades, Fontana has unearthed the hidden music that surrounds us every day, magnifying it and drawing our attention to it in striking ways. The
project descriptions that follow were realized between 1990 and 2014, and were key points in the development of Fontana’s career as an audio artist .
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Landscape Sounding, 1990
The Museum of Art History and
The Museum of Natural History
Vienna, Austria
This sound sculpture was created for the large public plaza situated between two
parallel museums, The Museum of Art History and the Museum of Natural History.
A live network of 16 microphones and several hydrophones were placed in an ancient Danube wetland in
Eastern Austria and transmitted live sound to Vienna where it was spatialized by a matrix mixing system into a 72 channel sound work.
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Sound Island, 1994
Arc De Triomphe
Paris, France
Sound Island was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of D-Day. A network of live microphones
and hydrophones were installed on the Normandy coast. They transmitted live sound to a loudspeaker system on the four facades of the Arc de Triomphe. The sound of sea wrapped the monument
as a form of natural white noise that nearly silenced the audible perception of traffic around one of the busiest traffic points in Paris.
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Harmonic Bridge, 2006
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern
London, United Kingdom
This site-specific sound sculpture was created for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. It was a real-time artwork
with a network of vibration sensors installed on the Millennium Bridge, designed by Sir Norman Foster, revealing its hidden sound which was transmitted to the Turbine Hall.
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Soaring Echoes, 2012
Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park
Chicago
Soaring Echoes is a site specific sound sculpture created for the multi-channel loudspeaker system permanently installed
in the Pritzker Pavilion and Trellis over the Great Lawn of Millennium Park, by Frank Gehry. This sound sculpture creates a myriad of spatial sonic clusters that are moving, flying
and floating through the air below and around the Trellis. Its presence is a transparent, kinetic and evocative overlay of sounds that interact with the physical scale of the Pavilion,
the Trellis and the urban context of Millennium Park. The compositional mixes created for Soaring Echoes use field recordings made from various natural, urban, marine and historical
environments of Chicago and its surroundings. The sound mix playing with this slide is a diffusion mix based on song bird recordings in the Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge, an
hours drive NW of Chicago.
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Sonic Mappings, 2014
MAXXI, National Museum of Contemporary Art
Rome
Sonic Mappings is a permanent sound sculpture installed in the entrance hall of MAXXI, National Museum of Contemporary
Art in Rome by Zaha Hadid. This museum is not in the historic center of Rome, and he was asked to realize a project that created a sonic connection. Since the flowing shapes of the
architecture are suggestive of flowing water, this sound sculpture maps a 2000-year-old Roman Aqueduct, the Acqua Vergine. A 48 channel Meyer loudspeaker system is installed in MAXXI,
translating the flowing sounds into the architectural shapes of the museum. A Meyer Dmitri system was used to program and tune this installation.
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Sonic Dreamscapes
A proposal for SoundScape Park, Miami Beach
“SoundScape Park has a sophisticated, permanent 72 channel loudspeaker system that is the perfect instrument to create
sound choreography inspired by the marine and natural environments of South Florida.”
Artist Statement
To create a unique musical vocabulary that will involve conducting intensive
field research about important environmental, social and cultural sounds of Miami Beach and South Florida, and to plan a series of field recording visits. These recordings will form
the sonic language of this artwork.
I will use a combination of microphones, vibration sensors that reveal the hidden sounds in structures and materials, and hydrophones to capture
and create an evocative and inspiring sound sculpture.
Parallel to recording sounds, I will also record moving images. These videos will be of an abstract nature and will explore the
idea of an image that a sound makes and the sound that an image makes which I call Acoustic Visions.
I have taught field recording seminars at universities around the world and would
be very interested to involve any of the New World Symphony Fellows in my field research and recordings.
Sonic Dreamscapes Proposal
Creation of a sound and video projection artwork
designed to run through the course of a day and evening in SoundScape Park.
The work will also consist of two additional types of sound and video that will have more of an event quality
about them. One would be a series of shorter sound sculptures that can be played at lunch time or before WALLCAST® concerts and Citi® Cinema Series at SoundScape. The other would be
a series of projection works that will have abstract visual and audio content inspired by the rich environments of Miami Beach and South Florida.
The all-day media artwork will begin
in the morning with a sound mix with many silent gaps between the individually appearing and disappearing sounding moments answering each other from different spatial points in SoundScape
Park. By the afternoon these sounding moments will grow longer.. The volume level of the sound sculpture will never be so loud as to not allow conversation in Soundscape Park. As day
turns into evening, environmentally inspired abstract videos will emerge on the video wall allowing visitors to experience a mirage of floating sounds and meditative images. Later in
the evening, the spatial sound composition gradually passes away and a silent abstract video remains.
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Acoustical Visions of the River Alde Marshes, 2017
Aldeburgh Festival
United Kingdom
This media artwork was created for the 50th anniversary of the Aldeburgh Festival, one of the most
famous contemporary music festivals in the United Kingdom. The location of the festival is in a nature reserve two hours northeast of London on the North Sea coast. This is an immersive
sound with abstract moving images artwork and stylistic example of a hybrid sound and video installation that could be shown in SoundScape Park.
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Surface Reflections
Conceptual Proposal
Kunsthaus Graz Contemporary Art Museum
Vienna, Austria,
Surface Reflections was created as a study for a future project about the Mur River,
Austria for the Kunsthaus Graz Contemporary Art Museum, Vienna, Austria, and is another example of the kind of hybrid audio and video work that could be shown in SoundScape Park.
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