Adam Ramona expose à Info Island

ADAM RAMONA

OPENING FRIDAY, JANUARY 25TH @ 6PM

Library Gallery, Info Island
January 25th - March 28, 2008

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Please join us from 6-7p SLT on Friday, January 25th, at the Info Island Gallery for the opening of an exhibition by noted Australian artist, Adam Ramona (Adam Nash in RL).

Adam is well known in SL for his interactive and immersive audiovisual sculptures. Walk around and through them, jump up and down, float, go in and out of mouselook, and make sure your AUDIO IS ON (headphones work best).

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From the artist...


If a sound was already playing when
we were born, played througout our
life, and continued playing after we
were gone, would we hear it?

Or would we hear it as silence?

All the sounds we hear are imperfect. For a sound to be perfect, it would have to have started before we were born and continue unabated through our life and after our death. But, according to R. Murray Schafer, such a sound "would be perceived by us as silence. That is why... all research into sound must conclude with silence. Not the silence of negative vacuum, but the positive silence of perfection and fulfilment."

But what of the virtual world? Is there silence in the virtual world? Is it all silence, with only sound objects (Pierre Schaeffer's objets sonore, "pieces of time torn from the cosmos") placed strategically, recontextualised to support the illusion that the virtual is an illusion of reality? Perhaps the real sound of the virtual environment is the hum, whir and click of the processors doing the calculations responsible for rendering the audiovisual virtua, the breathing of the users and their click clack of mouse and keyboard. Others can't hear it, but imagine how loud it is - 25,000 people all breathing, clicking and clacking at their humming, whirring computers.

Schaeffer's concept of 'reduced listening' ("hearing a sound as sound, rather than listening for its cause or meaning", as Toop relays Chion's explanation of the concept) is the only kind of listening possible in the virtual world. Sound is prior to context. The sound creates the context. That context may in the service of the illusion, or it may create a context without precedent in the physical world - especially interesting when the sound source is a digital sample of a real world sound, which is the only kind of sound that SL, and most virtual environments, allow.

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For more information on the work of Adam Ramona / Adam Nash, please see:

A recent interview at Turbulence...
http://transition.turbulence.org/networked_music_review/2007/12/13/interview-adam-nash/

A list of projects at...
http://yamanakanash.net/projects.html

Visit "Ramonia" -- the Garden of Immersive Sound -- at Marni 220, 195, 22

Visit "17 Unsung Songs" -- at East of Odyssey 37, 89, 32