Chromasonic – Fluid State is located in Deep Creek Mine, Telluride, CO. The 60-foot-long installation is sited in the mine’s longest shaft, a pitch-black space the length of a football field. In the heart of the mountain, Chromasonic – Fluid State is the site’s only source of light.
The installation is composed of four connected spaces created by a series of translucent scrims. Light waves generated from sound waves illuminate each of the four rooms using “Chromasonic-Refrequencing,” a real-time algorithmic process that creates fundamental relationships between light and sound. As sound fills each of the four spaces, light illuminates the installation in correlating hues. The dynamic between light, sound, scrim, and mine, creates an experiential state that is fluid at all times. Fields of view continuously open and close. Space appears to physically expand and contract, depending on a participant’s position and the flow of sound-generated light. This renders the site and its participants – both awash in light and sound – in a continuous flow of perceptual activation and adjustment. At the heart of the mine, this installation brings light into darkness. As a sensory catalyst, Chromasonic – Fluid State is an opportunity to ponder presence individually and in community with other participants. It is an occasion to experience how our environment constantly shifts and shapes what we see and what we don’t see. Chromasonic – Fluid State, in its physically and perceptually immersive layering, can be a meditation on what reality we are able to perceive at any given time.
Chromasonic started as a collaborative studio and research lab formed by installation and multi-media artist Johannes Girardoni with sound artists and musicians Orpheo McCord and Joel Shearer. Chromasonic creates large-scale, polysensory installations to explore non-ordinary states of consciousness by developing organic technologies that connect light and sound frequencies in immersive communal environments.
Conceived as a cultural impact enterprise, Chromasonic proposes its work as a disruption to the attention-monopolizing effects of mainstream technologies that have permeated contemporary culture. Fusing science with art in light and sound, the studio embraces an ethical use of technology to integrate natural and artificial cognition. Chromasonic explores the potential of art as a catalyst to harmonize cognitive and somatic states while amplifying awareness and connection to self and others.
