Ron Kuivila: An Outgoing Message
Media Space @ DeCordova/Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Gallery
September 13, 2003 – January 18, 2004
Based on Ron Kuivila's studies of audio tones used by telephones throughout the world, An Outgoing Message is an exhibition to be heard rather than seen. The rings, dial tones, and busy signals of the world's telephone systems comprise an odd collection of simple musical gestures.
Sound art is an important subset of installation art and new media; composers are, in a sense, "sculpting" with sound rather than matter. Instead of creating a musical composition that can be heard in a one-time linear performance by an audience, composers are exploring the effect of sounds in different physical spaces, relying on an audience that can move throughout the sound installation and even interact with it.
Kuivila uses the musical components of international telephone systems to create an installation of three sound sources. First, there is a two-channel musical piece created by electronically synthesizing the world's telephone signals, which are then mixed and overlapped in ways that reveal their microtonal relationships, adding emphasis to the moments of silence that occur. One channel plays in the gallery over speakers. Visitors experience the other channel by picking up any of the three phones on the pedestals and listening. Second, the telephones on a shelf along the wall ring periodically. Do not answer these. Unlike the normal ring of a phone receiving a 20 Hz tone, these phones ring in an erratic rhythm of single rings as they receive tones that vary between 15 and 30 Hz. At five-minute intervals, this pulsation is punctuated with a sustained ringing produced by a ring tone making a glissando from 60 to 15 Hz. Quartz watches, the last of these three sources of sound, chime at all times of the hour.
Ron Kuivila studied with Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University and with Robert Ashley and David Behrman at Mills College. Kuivila has performed and exhibited throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. Recent projects have included commissions from MASS MoCA; the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany; Singuhr Galerie in Berlin, Germany; and V2 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Kuivila is on the faculty of the Music Department at Wesleyan University.
