Open eyes, open ears

“What Sound Does a Color Make?”

Jim Campbell, D-Fuse, Steina Vasulka, Stephen Vitiello, more… “What Sound Does a Color Make?”

Jim Campbell, D-Fuse, Steina Vasulka, Stephen Vitiello, more

Wood Street Galleries

601 Wood St.

(412) 471-5605

Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which a stimulus to one of the senses triggers another response in a different sense, such as hearing a sound and imagining a visual representation. This is the inspiration for 16 artists showcasing their work in the Wood Street Galleries’ latest exhibition, “What Sound Does a Color Make?”

The show is a traveling exhibit, which opened Nov. 4 in Pittsburgh and is running until the end of the year.

If you are a little confused as to what this may look or sound like, picture Stanley Kubrick’s 23-minute audiovisual spectacle in “2001: A Space Odyssey” or even the geometric visualizations on your computer’s media player.

What’s interesting about this show, guest curated by Kathleen Forde, is that it seeks to create a continuum between the early experiments of aural and visual relations in the pre-digital era with today’s modern endeavors in a digital world.

This is done by displaying the work of Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut of the ’60s and Gary Hill’s work of the ’70s alongside those of modern digital artists, such as Stephan Vitiello.

The exhibit also juxtaposes three exhibits of Steina Vasulka – two from the ’70s and one from 1999. This helps to reflect the progress of an artist in relation to the progress of technology, which she uses as a medium.

In “Violin Power,” made between ’70 and ’78, Vasulka took a filmed performance of her playing the violin and processed the images based on the sounds and vibrations of the instrument to distort and abstract the footage.

Her 1999 work, “Trevor,” still employs the concept of altering taped musical performances, only here she takes a performance from musician Trevor Wishart and, using modern technology, is able to digitally warp his words while reworking the visual aspect to create her own rhythmic patterns between seeing and hearing.

Similarly, Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut’s “Beatles Electroniques” alters and distorts the sound and video from a Beatles concert in a way that plays with our impression of pop culture by taking it out of its common construction and representation.

The visual-arts quartet, D-Fuse, gives us what most resembles a media player’s visualizations. The difference, though, is that its project, “D-Tonate,” takes artists’ abstract videos and combines them with original musical works – mostly techno – to enhance the visual aspect of the piece.

All of these pieces consist of a monitor or screen of some sort as well as headphones which the viewer/listener can use to immerse himself in each respective piece; however, some of the works take a more singular approach.

Jim Campbell’s 2003 “Self-Portrait of Paul [DeMarinis]” uses a sequence of tones of DeMarinis’ voice picked up by a microphone that decodes and interprets the sound into a grid of LED lights, which light up in varying degrees of brightness. The result is an image that resembles DeMarinis’ portrait.

Scott Arford, whose “Static Room” video and audio aspects are both interpreted from the same original static signal, best explains the experience in the exhibits brochure: “Experiencing it is learning how to see with your ears wide open.”