Untitled (plate tectonics)
2009—ongoing, multi-channel sound installation with acetate phonograph records
Untitled (plate tectonics) is a sound installation made from a library of room recordings of visual art spaces that have been important in Graydon’s life. Though these spaces may have been significant for their visual presence, capturing their sound alone underscores the fundamental ungraspability of experience. With each presentation of the work, a new record of that exhibition room is added; meanwhile, the fragile acetate of the records decays, slowly losing its original sound to time. Sound emits from loudspeakers but also from exciters attached to the wood and glass of the gallery’s structure, allowing the building itself to conduct the vibrations of these past spaces.
After obtaining the ambient sounds of eleven “natural” art locations in New York – museums, fairs, galleries – Graydon cut the recordings onto unique acetate phonograph records, dubplates, that allow visitors to reshape PROGRAM’s gallery space with sound. Environment is used as a material. Replaying the sounds of these New York institutions as they intermix with the ambient sounds of PROGRAM, space is at once extended and collapsed. Dubplates, for the music industry, are used in mastering studios before the final master. They are meant for temporary use, they deteriorate over time. The sounds recorded on their surface begin to dissolve after about fifty plays.
—Carson Chan, Program Initiative for Art and Architecture Collaborations, Berlin