Dark Matter

Dark Matter
video/mp4
640 × 480
14:20

Dark Matter
video/mp4
640 × 480
14:20

Dark Matter: The darkened gallery space is dominated by an invisible sculpture of silent sound. Your body probes the space listening for the sculpture's spatial form to be expressed though the sounds of your contact with its immaterial presence.

Infrared sensitive video cameras survey the darkened gallery from 4 angles. These cameras carve up the space into thousands of 3 dimensional zones. A selection of these zones have been attributed sound behaviours. Together, these interactive zones define a complex physical but invisible form in the gallery space. A computer cross-references the data from the cameras to work out which zones are experiencing the greatest physical activity at any given moment and plays the sounds linked to those zones through an 8-channel sound system, distributing the sounds through the space in relation to the locations of the physical stimuli.

The sounds are all very physical: breaking ice and breaking glass, creaking metal, falling rocks, bursts of flame. They were "painted" into the space by hand. Starting with an empty space, the artist placed the sounds in the space by selecting a sound then waving his hand in a particular area to locate the sound in a particular cubic foot of space; the interactive sculpture of sound was defined in space by hand.