Johannes Girardoni & Harriet Girardoni

Colorvoid – Blue Violet
Beeswax, pigment, wood
14″ (h) × 14″ (w) × 4.25″ (d)
2024

Colorvoid – White
Beeswax, pigment, wood
24″ (h) × 3.5″ (w) × 3.5″ (d)
2024

PDX Contemporary Art presents (in)finite, an exhibition of new works by Johannes Girardoni from his ongoing series of Light Reactive Organic Sculpture. In a time dominated by pervasive technological interfaces, these works stand as a deliberate counterpoint, embracing the elemental materials of wood, beeswax, and pigment. Through their reductive investigation into the relationship between light and material — of color as matter — these sculptures engage both the physical and the phenomenological.

As organic instruments, these pieces meditate on presence, absence, and the ever-shifting boundaries between materiality and immateriality. They embody a quiet dialogue with the natural world, offering a reflective place and space in stark contrast to the relentless pace of our current cultural condition.

Although Girardoni’s sculptures and installations have expanded to incorporate digital technologies and artificial perception since 2009 in works such as The Passage Room (ACFNY, 2008) and the (Dis)appearance of Everything (54th Venice Biennale, 2011), he remains committed to examining how the spatial orchestration of these organic structures — as instruments of experiential placemaking — engage with themes of sensory perception that resonate across his broader practice. Through these works, Girardoni continues to explore how intersections of light, matter, and perception affirm the fundamental value of tactile, haptic, and unmediated lived experience.

PDX Contemporary Art
August 28 – September 28, 2024

Fluid Planes, 2022, a site-specific installation that generates sound waves from light, as shown at the Berggruen Institute.

Fluid Planes, 2022. Installation view at the Berggruen Institute, Los Angeles, CA.

Artist Johannes Girardoni, neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, and Berggruen Institute’s
Future Humans Program Director Claire Webb converse about art, technology, and consciousness.

Fluid Planes, an experimental Chromasonic installation created by Johannes Girardoni and the studio team, has a basic form of sentience. It senses its own process of converting light into sound and allows participants to hear the sound of light, augmenting perception through technology. The Berggruen Institute and Chromasonic presented their second collaborative Salon in November 2022 at the iconic Bradbury Building. The installation catalyzed a thought-provoking discussion between Girardoni, leading neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, and Claire Isabel Webb, Associate Director of the Future Humans Theme. Together, they explored how the intersection of art and science expands our understanding of mind and cognition, shaping new philosophical perspectives on “the human” and our collective future.

For further information see Berggruen.org

A collaboration between artists Johannes Girardoni and Harriet Girardoni with architects Takashi Yanai and Steven Ehrlich, partners of EYRC, Spectral Bridge House embodies the concept of “art before architecture,” a philosophy advocated by Studio Girardoni in their projects that engage the built environment. Studio Girardoni creates site-specific projects that explore connections between art, design, technology, and architecture to pursue experiential states of radical presence.

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. 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 three-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

The Infinite Room, Washington, USA

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

Concept sketch for The Passage Room, 2009, ACFNY

The Passage Room, 2009, ACFNY
Scrims, Aluminum, LEDs, video projection, Spectro-Sonic Refrequencer
9.5′ (h) × 16′ (w) × 30′ (d)

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 through Spectro-Sonic refrequencing, 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.

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.

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.

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.

l to r: Joseph Becker
Curator of Architecture & Design @ SFMOMA
Artist Johannes Girardoni
Takashi Yanai, EYRC Architects

Johannes Girardoni & Takashi Yanai Speak on Art + Architecture with SFMOMA Architecture and Design Curator Joseph Becker

On January 31, Takashi Yanai of EYRC  joined artist Johannes Girardoni and Joseph Becker, Architecture+Design Curator at SF MoMA, for a conversation about integrating art and architecture. The trio discussed inspirations for their own works and Spectral Bridge House, a recent project by EYRC and Girardoni that blurs the lines of art and architecture.

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.