September 20th, 2003 No. 1 [Enlarge in New Window]

Cindy Bernard and Joseph Hammer: soundCommons

Over the last decade, sound art has become increasingly complex and compelling, garnering a large number of creative participants who are intrigued by the possibility of countering the widespread cultural obsession with visual images. Two artists at the forefront of experiments in this evolving genre are Cindy Bernard and Joseph Hammer, both of whom are concerned with altering and subverting everyday experiences to create new ones. In their work, the usual sights and sounds of a common situation, such as watching a movie or riding a train, are manipulated, thus projecting new sensory associations for the viewer. In their latest project, the Los Angeles-based collaborators are moving a step further in their concerns--they are building soundCommons, an innovative website that facilitates the creation and distribution of experimental sound projects across the Internet.

Hammer and Bernard have collaborated on several projects to date, including the performance projections+sound (1999-2001); the websites projections+sound (web) (2000-01) for the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and corridor (2001) for Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art; and the installation piece untitled[gel/sound] (2002) for the Los Angeles Metro Rail. All four projects bring together the backgrounds and interests of the partners--Hammer has actively created experimental works since 1980. His practice draws on the complexities of the process of listening and playing, reflecting on the role of the audience versus the performer, and uses music as it influences our notion of time, memory, and intimacy as the basis for improvisation and abstraction. Bernard not only created the popular experimental music series "sound." and founded SASSAS (the Society for the Activation of Social Spaces through Art and Sound), but has widely exhibited her intriguing photographs and projections, which investigate issues of cultural memory, landscape, and cinema.

In explaining the impetus for their collaborative work, Hammer and Bernard like to reference a 1967 photograph of Hammer as their inspiration. The picture shows him as a young boy standing next to his family's station wagon holding a pair of unlikely objects: a suction cup and a piece of red gel. "Joseph passed his time during a vacation by making sounds with the suction cup and peering at the landscape through the red gel," they explain in an email interview. "Joseph's childhood use of color and sound to shift his perception of the passing view out the car window prompted us to rethink the function of a two-dimensional plane as a focus for representations of landscape."

This rethinking has taken several forms. In projections+sound, the pair experiments with "disfocus" by shifting attention from the traditionally disconnected plane of the movie screen in front of the audience to the performance space itself, which merges with the perceptual space of the viewers. Using a series of color dissolves and manipulated tape loops, Hammer and Bernard prompt a series of "memories of place displaced from physical representation." As with a dream, any sense of focus or coherence occurs only in retrospect as viewers attempt to reconstruct the performance through memory.

Similarly, in untitled[gel/sound], Hammer and Bernard worked with lighting gels and subliminal sound in the hopes of subtly affecting the ways in which MetroRail riders experienced mass transit. In both of these projects, the artworks suffuse a space; rather than having a focus establishing a center of attention, the work is situated in the body of the receiver. "We foreground opticality and aurality to point to subjectivity," note the artists.

Hammer and Bernard see soundCommons as both a catalyst for experimental sound practices, and as a means for creating public space that disregards traditional disciplinary boundaries. In its working form, the site will be not only a forum for discussion but a conduit for experimentation and a place for facilitating new collaborations.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Emerging Fields > Digital Arts / New Media | California | 2002