‘Spectral Time’, 2022, the present

The experiential work on this screen, a dedicated web project, expresses time as a progression of color. ‘Spectral Time’ disconnects from a temporal experience tethered to observing seconds, minutes, and hours. Instead, ‘Spectral Time’ gradates through the visible spectrum over the entire day, starting and ending in red at midnight.

To enter the site, navigate towards the center of the screen.

Thought Experiment – reVIBRATION No. 01, 2004

reVIBRATION No. 01 (rV01), 2004 – Study

In 2004, Johannes Girardoni created a study of reVIBRATION No. 01 (rV01), a project abstract for an interactive installation that has since served as the foundation for the studio’s work in the research of artificial sensing and its impact on perception and cognition.

“reVIBRATION No. 01 is a room-size sculptural installation comprising a field of repeating cylindrical elements suspended in a grid pattern in which sensors capture the ‘light’ of this environment and its contents, including its visitors. Software converts the light into ‘sound,’ which is projected back in real-time, thus yielding an intangible equivalent of the 3-dimensional space.

rVO1 is the first in a series of poly-sensory sculptural installations that explore the interface of space, form, sound, light, and experience. The work involves a minimum of twelve cylindrical structures vertically suspended in a grid pattern. These forms are softened by rounded contours and are made of beeswax mixed with yellow pigment. The room will be under continuous surveillance with a system of sensors that capture the ‘light waves’ of the room. These recorded light waves are translated in real-time into ‘sound waves’ and fed back into the space.

The suspended elements will be distributed so visitors can comfortably move between them, yet close enough that the forms visually and physically have a charged relationship. Visitors are invited to travel around and into the sculpture. The farther within a participant goes, the more intimate the space and the viewer’s experience of it will become. Towards the center of the ‘field,’ participants will experience themselves surrounded mainly by the forms, with only glimpses of the exterior. At any given moment, the viewers’ presence and movement affect the sound the work emits.

By interpreting physical matter as waves and transposing the waves into sound, reVIBRATION No. 01 explores the blurring of boundaries between the physical and immaterial, object and subject, seeing and being seen, color, form, and sound.”

Johannes Girardoni, New York, 2004

In Situ

The Infinite Room, 2008-2012, Washington, USA

 

The Infinite Room, as seen on a recent site visit. The Infinite Room is a site-specific analog light and sound installation integrated with the architecture of a Tom Kundig-designed building, as seen on a recent site visit.

Thought Experiment

Situation 9, 2011, Johannes Girardoni Studio, Austria

In Situ

Stairway to Spectral Bridge, Spectral Bridge House, Venice, CA, United States

Works in Process

Resonant Disk

In Situ

Concept sketch for The Passage Room, 2009, ACFNY

The Passage Room, 2009, ACFNY

The Passage Room is a site-specific light and sound installation, which investigates the boundary between manufactured states and perceptual events. It is an architectural intervention of the main exhibition hall of the Raimund Abraham-designed Austrian Cultural Forum New York, a space limited by its extremely narrow footprint. The installation is devised with two offset, parallel scrim walls that intersect the space midway, perpendicularly redoubling the narrow layout of the space and compressing its focal point to a passage at its center. The translucent walls, flooded with purple light emanating from LEDs at the installation’s midpoint, forms a constricted “passage room” which stages spectators as part of the sculpture. When viewed on approach, the narrow passage gently veils its interior, revealing everything and everyone in it. However, while inside, the scrims appear as opaque fields of color and the space outside the scrims becomes obscured. Viewers become participants, and participants become performers, blurring the boundary between subject and object, seeing and being seen. Passing through the installation, visual planes appear to open and close depending on the viewer’s position within the work, creating a constantly shifting experience. A modulating sound field, generated by the light, is superimposed onto the work’s layered setting. The LEDs at the center of the installation emit wavelengths of light from opposite ends of the visible spectrum — red and blue — which are experienced as purple, a non-spectral color. Based on scientific method and an algorithmic conversion, the electromagnetic waves of red and blue light are transposed onto mechanical waves of sound, rearticulating light waves into sound waves, making purple audible. The Passage Room’s physical and virtual architecture explores the limits of our sensory apparatus through an interface of digitally reconfigured information and naturally occurring perceptual phenomena.

Works in Process

Volumetric study for The Infinite Room (Metaspace 1), 2008-2015

The Infinite Room is a permanent sculpture sited in a building designed by Cooper Hewitt National Design Award recipient Tom Kundig of Seattle-based Olson Kundig architects. Lit solely through an oculus, the smooth curvilinear geometry of the sculpture scatters natural light to create a borderless space. The interior shifts in appearance with changing light conditions, giving The Infinite Room an ephemeral quality. The space appears to continually iterate new versions of itself.

 

SpectroSonic – Yellow Pink

Chromasonic – Yellow Pink; Resin, pigment, LEDs, aluminum;
94 × 4 × 3 in; 2013

Refrequencers, are a convergence of light and material, re-articulated into different physical forms. Made of cast resin, within which illumination from LEDs and natural light mesh to different degrees, these works appear to shift in color depending on the current light situation and the position and movement of the viewer. Refrequencers use sensors to capture the light waveforms emanating from the resin, and digitally convert the light information into a sound vibration, making light audible.

In Situ

Chromasonic – Field Study, 2022. Photo: JG Studio

Chromasonic – Field Study, is an experimental installation now on view at The Lab at Compound, a new cultural complex in Long Beach, CA dedicated to the intersection of art and community engagement to promote connectivity and belonging. The installation, which algorithmically connects light and sound frequencies, serves as a study for the development of Chromasonic – Sensory Field.

Chromasonic creates large-scale, polysensory installations to explore non-ordinary states of consciousness through the development of organic technologies that harmonize light and sound frequencies in immersive communal environments.

Chromasonic believes in the potential of the arts as a catalyst to harmonize mind and body and is building a network of temporary and permanent sites to support a sensory practice for wellbeing.

Field Study will be on view through June 2022, and serve as a site for Chromasonic to experiment with various sequences.

For more information visit Compound and Chromasonic.

Stacked.3600 (Sound of Silence)

Stacked.3600 (Sound of Silence)
1995
Stacked cardboard
10′ (h) × 8′ (w) × 2′ (d)

Stacked.3600 (Sound of Silence) is an installation using a simple serialized element – a flat recycled sheet of cardboard. The physical volume of the sculpture forms a field of silence for participants experiencing the work in close proximity. The resulting sonic space creates a sensory condition characterized by a palpable absence of sound, making a place for pause and reflection.