User:Thtwind

en-route to understanding what I meant by audible constructs

As a grad student in 1969, I proposed and sound course, Audible constructs, and I was accepted to teach it while doing independent study course work. With dialogue-catalyzing assistance from my wife Gloria, I'm recall the basis for doing so.

I had installed Terrain Instrument outdoor installations series, as an adjunct to form and sought an orchestration ac actual natural forces rather than simply physically replicating them or synthesizing artificial sources. Outdoor space was the context for my constructions which electronically monitored and acoustically orchestrated tree dynamics, wind, snow, sleet, rain and other natural phenomena. Most of these structures consisted of woven and meshed constructions in air space of a variety of types and gauges of tunable brass, and steel wire strands and included aluminum tubing and wire ribbons suspended carefully between tree clusters. Magnesium computer storage discs from surplus radio stores were used. At this point I sought out analog voltages from nature and created cassette recordings. To monitor these vibrations I used crystal and magnetic transducers to sense terrestrial, atmospheric and vibrational activity occurring on the wires, from ground vibrations and from trees. The Terrain Instruments were not scaled-up versions of existing musical instruments, but an expression of new research into form and sound.

The Art Institute school roof was the site, in 1969, of one of his earliest experimental installations. For the 1970 Fellowship Show, for which I was awarded the Anna Louis Raymond Fellowship and installed a half-hexagram construction in Gunsaulus Hall. This required my borrowing fans from classrooms to simulate indoor wind. In the 1972 exhibition, I also received the Art Sales and Rental Gallery Fellowship for the the Meadow Piano prototype, and for a series of collages which focused on my increasing interest in global information gathering and processing systems and the interactions and poetics of weather. In my graduate student Teaching Assistantship I developed and offered the Audible Constructs program on a teaching schedule of six hours weekly. Concerned equally with both technology and ideas, the classes introduced sound as an autonomous art form, and also explored, according to the interests of the students, ways in which could could work with the visual media. I was keenly aware of the challenge of veering from the traditional exposures I had had up to this point and I realized that I could not pursue this alone-furthering my course development and understanding the complex flux of what audible constructions would encompass. I felt there had to others in the same boat. URL IMAGE refs

On leaving the Chicago School of the Art Institute in 1972, I was hired as an Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa-Iowa City. A national Endowment for the Arts project grant allowed acquisition, in 1973, of professional quality recording equipment, and construction of new prototypes in the Iowa landscape. Consulting with physicists, computer scientists, structural and electrical engineers, music and art students with a Lindquist Computer Center fellowship, I developed a proposal for an interactive, generative public-use sculpture, the Iowa City sculptural Riverharps project, which used natural forces as direct resources for sound orchestration.

In Fall, 1976 I assumed leadership of the sculptural area at the University of Minnesota, Duluth Campus. Locating on Lake Superior's northeastern shore provided excellent new opportunities for working with the environment.

New tapes resulted as part of an "Imported Sources" performance in the February Performance/Midway series at the University of Chicago achieved the unification, through sound, of forest constructions and a spatial configuration which monitored shifts and stresses in the Meany ice shelf on Lake Superior. A Minnesota State Arts Board awarded me one of its comparatively rare individual artist's grants for construction of a new Terrain Instrument which, using more sensitive and diverse sensors and strain gauges to elicit sound from minute temperature variations, and provided new possibilities for more complex orchestrations and playings. A modulated Hene laser transmitter and receiver link allowed more direct mixing of audio from several acoustically-different environments, and included documentation using new sensors to enhance the range of the available natural sound vocabulary and, prior to new planned constructions and orchestrations. This identification process took into account the variables of seasonal changes, weather activity, surrounding forest conditions, and other natural phenomena which would affect sounding event qualities.

A focused concern was the urgent need for new aesthetic models and processes which could allow artists to expand the traditional humanistic bases of art while fully using contemporary tools, technologies and media, and he felt that nature can continue as a prime source for artistic inspiration.