Sonar SURGE — Ingrid Backmann, Lorraine Oades, Ana Rewakowicz Blurring Figural Notations Terry Tremayne p retend for a moment that you have no stylus, no gauge and only the vaguest of reference points. Imagine you have almost no concrete position at all, no object to copy and no material ground upon which to draw or place it. All you perceive is the phenomenal quality that surrounds and envelops built form.You are not lost but might as well be. First you hear a sound in isolation, you are alone, and then a dialogue,
Sonar, a multimedia project, was installed in July- August 2001 by SURGE in the abandoned piscine St-Michel. Consisting of a grid of copper piping that sprayed a mist over an empty pool, the work essentially re-activated the building and provided refuge from the heat of summer.
ness on the resolute materials that build a frame, if not the ground, for architectural events.This is the effect of sound and of light, and in the case of Sonar , the effect of dissolving the substance of architecture into its corresponding image — the effect of establishing the interplay between the weight of architectural substance and its spatializing non- material qualities. The image that supports the weight of this pool is an image of space where sound in concert with light defines the bounds of form, its tempo, timbre, tone, intensity; another way of saying material, a parallel representation of space, temporary, immanent, a near formless image.To eventualise phenomena is to give some form to this oscillating process of dissociating expectation from recognition.We watch, we listen and reach out for some indication of a change in phase, some indication that we are still there within tangible space. In this place you might almost disappear but for the affirmative realization of touch and the stereophonic sound of your incessant breathing. Form is eventualized and recedes, dissociates itself temporarily from the empty tank that frames our experience. But these fleeting impressions will always move off, one step ahead of us as it were.We are resolute.We are not flecks of colour only, nor mute disembodied specks of light, or objects that creak in the dark.We are neither built of fragments of larger things nor fully imaginary visages. Our ground remains immutable. Unlike water vapour we can not disappear.We experience our weight as if everything depended on it.
humidity, a dim light and moisture, polyphony. At just that instant distance and isolation give way to spatial definition. You look down and find yourself inside an impressionistic picture of weightlessness. You reach out and locate yourself in an architecture of brief, albeit re-affirmative, encounters that added together direct you back towards the door. Installed in the ageing and near-forgotten public pool, La Piscine St- Michel, Sonar intervenes in the moments that separate building from experience; an empty pool tank from its phenomenal appearance. La Piscine St-Michel becomes the pictorial ground upon which an image of desire is redrawn — a desire to refigure this abandoned architectural shell and move beyond programmatic and material expectation into an interstitial image of informal atmospheric space.This blurring image marks the transition from being physically attuned to base needs — gravity, ground and air, to being suspended in an image of interiorized phenomenal space. Sonar is not solely concerned with the grounding of material architec- ture, the ground of stereotomy and of its resistance, impenetrability and weight. It also reveals the spatialising effects of phenomenal weightless-
Terry Tremayne is a critic currently living in London, England. This text is taken from a longer review of Sonar.
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O n S ite review
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I ssue 10 2003
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