Andy Graydon, a long time partner and collaborator, recently exhibited his latest work in Berlin - Untitled (plate tectonics). It is a fascinating study of the experience of space (specifically museum space) through sound. 

Below is a description of the work.

"By installing excavated stones from New Jersey in a gallery, Robert Smithson, in the late 1960s, revealed the dialectic between abstract and actual locations. Sometimes in containers, sometimes piled, the stones in the gallery represented a far away location without resembling it. Something of New Jersey, Smithson maintained, was held in those rocks and their displacement resulted in the expansion of the original site, both physically and conceptually. The Site Non-Site dialectic, as Smithson called it, feels particularly familiar today as our daily lives are continually reshaped by place-defying technologies in communication, information and travel.

With Untitled (plate tectonics), Andy Graydon similarly explores the physical dimensions of location in contrast to its perception. 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.

Untitled (plate tectonics) is accompanied here by Scaffold (Invalidenstrasse 115), an installation piece that uses video-projected light to animate and complicate certain characteristics of the exhibition space’s architecture, suspending it somewhere between architectural and cinematic space."

For more on the work and samples of the actual recordings, check out www.programonline.de/untitled.html.

-Pete Bjordahl