Johannes Girardoni

The Infinite Room, 2008-2012, Washington, USA

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

Friday, May 6, and Saturday, May 7,  Chromasonic hosts happenings at Chromasonic – Satellite One in Venice, CA, and Chromasonic – Field Study at @compoundlb to help World Central Kitchen @wckitchen provide fresh meals to those affected by the war in Ukraine.

A sequence inspired by the colors of the Ukrainian flag introduces each experience at the Chromasonic sites.  Head to @chromasonic’s  link tree for more information on how to support these benefit happenings.

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 open and close depending on the viewers’ 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.

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, which will become one of the largest artworks on the West Coast and will be first exhibited later this year.

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.

The studio proposes its work as an experimental disruption to the attention monopolizing effects of the mainstream technologies that have permeated our culture. Fusing science with art in light and sound, Chromasonic embraces an ethical use of technology to integrate natural and artificial cognition. The work explores the potential of art as a catalyst to harmonize cognitive and somatic states while amplifying awareness and connection to self and others.

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)
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.