168 — 169
Bill Fontana,
Autor
Hans Ulrich Obrist

Bill Fontana andHans Ulrich Obrist
In conversation

Bill Fontana at the recordings ofPrince Alfred Bridge, 1977

Hans Ulrich Obrist: You have been recording sound for 50 years…

HUO: Can you tell me about your memory for sound?

Bill Fontana: Yes I have, and the part of technology that’s really changed during thistime is the recording part of the machines.
HUO: How did you record in the 1970s?

BF: I’ve been recording thousands of sounds over the 50-year period of my work.
When I listen to them, I feel like I’m going through some sort of time travel, like I am
re-entering my body and my consciousness from some moment in the past, where I
was really listening.

BF: With beautiful handmade Swiss recorders, one called the Nagra and the other the
Stellavox. These recorded on tapes and had very good microphone preamps.

HUO: A lot of the sounds you recorded probably no longer exist. In a way your work
also talks about extinction.

HUO: Did the way you recorded change with the digital age?

BF: I began my first digital recordings in 1985. Then later, into the 1990s, I started to
get the new DAT [Digital Audio Tape] recorders.

BF: Yes, there is extinction. I think my favourite story about that was my experienceof the solar eclipse in Australia. In the 1970s I was working for the Australian broadcasting company. The job was to record what Australia sounded like. On October 23rd,
1976 there was a total eclipse of the sun. It went through the rainforest in South
Eastern Australia, about 100 miles east of Melbourne. I knew something interesting
was going to happen with the effect of the eclipse on the wildlife. I went there, andwas totally by myself in this beautiful rainforest. I recorded the effects of the total
eclipse of the sun on the birds in the rainforest: starting about seven or eight minutes
before the total eclipse actually arrived, the light became completely strange, andthe shadows in the rainforest started to sparkle and shimmer. Normally birds in therainforest, or in any natural landscape, do not sing all at the same time—they singaccording to the position of the sun, and things like that. But during these minutes
before the total eclipse, they basically all sang collectively. So part of me thought,
what the heck is going on here? And then, when the total eclipse arrives, it’s not likea sunset, it is like a light switch, it just goes dark. Then they essentially stop. It was
really dramatic—10 or 12 minutes of sound and silence.

HUO: And now?

HUO: Amazing, and not an easily repeated task, I guess.

BF: Well, what I have here is very simple, but I have more complex stuff. I basicallytravel with a portable recording studio because I not only have microphones, I also
have hydrophones, which are underwater. My friends and I have these vibration
sensors called accelerometers. But the most important equipment is actually
between my ears.

BF: Yes, that bit of the recording has been stored in the collection of some museum.
You know the next time an eclipse is going to happen in this rainforest will be in
5,000 years? So it was a once-in-a-5,000-year opportunity to hear it. So connecting
to sounds that disappear—this recording is certainly a very interesting piece.

BF: The first digital recorder I had was in the mid-1980s, and the first digitalrecorders recorded sound and video tape. This was Betamax. And there was this box,
about the size of a video recorder, that was an analogue digital conversion. It would
take an analogue input and convert it into a recorded signal on video tape.
HUO: So it was much more voluminous than today?
BF: It was. Also, the early digital recorders didn’t sound as good as today, simply
because analogue digital conversion was still pretty new.
HUO: Which year did you shift to digital?

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Bill Fontana,
Autor
Hans Ulrich Obrist

HUO: Yes the idea of sounds disappearing seems an interesting topic in your workthat I am sure we will get back to.
But for now, let´s turn to your biography. You were born in 1947 in Cleveland. I was
curious as to how you came to art, how art came to you? Or how you came to sound,
how sound came to you?
BF: I grew up in a neighbourhood that was within walking distance of the Cleveland
Museum of Art and the Cleveland Orchestra. Ever since I can remember I wasinterested in music, and had fantasies as a boy of becoming a composer of greatmusic. When I got older, by the time I was at high school and getting into college,
I was experimenting a lot with writing music in a very minimalist sort of way. I foundthat to create music I needed to have a kind of a hyperfocus, as there are ambient
sounds in that situation. So, as I was trying to write music, I became more interested
in my perception of the ambient sounds. I came to the idea that the act of listening
was a way of making music, and found out what kind of hyperfocus I could have. Then
I got my first real recorder in 1967. And I started recording sounds and using headphones.
HUO: This is interesting: You said it seemed that you needed a hyperfocus to hearmusic in the ambient sounds. So when you were in a state of mind that was especially
focused, you could make music that was a way of experiencing the world. Can you
explain that to me?
BF: It has to do with pattern recognition. If you use your brain in a certain way, youstart to recognise those patterns. It became a kind of mental habit for me to listen
and to hear them. And the more I did it, the more normal it was for me to do that.
When I was a college student the Vietnam war was on, and I wasn’t sure what kind ofcareer path I was going to have. In Cleveland I was enrolled at the music conservatory,
for composition, but also at the university as a philosophy major. I took all the philosophy classes, as specifically logic and philosophy of speech somehow seemed closer
to what I was looking for in music than what I got at the music faculty. When I
saw that John Cage was teaching a class in New York called ‘Experimental Music
Composition’, I enrolled in the New School College and went to New York.
HUO: The analytical aspect of the recording and listening is particularly interesting tome. When I became friends with Jonas Mekas in the early 1990s he taught me how to
use a camera, which is why I actually record my interviews. There wouldn’t be 4,000
hours of conversations if he hadn’t taught me to use it as a kind of notebook, daily,
so I always film and record, reacting to a constant flux of reality, keeping track ofpresence. You said that you started to make those first recordings in a similar way toJonas using a camera. Can you tell me something about this, also because it connectswith that famous Cage quote, which came from Thoreau: ‘Music is continuous; only
listening is intermittent’?
BF: That’s kind of a fundamental idea of my work, especially in the later work where,
as I got to know Cage, the more I got feedback on some of my ideas. In 1968, there
was an exhibition at MoMA in New York called The Machine as Seen at the End of
the Mechanical Age, and it was the first time in my life that I have ever seen any of
Duchamp’s work.
HUO: It was the late K.G. Pontus Hultén who curated that show in the year I was born,1968. I have the wonderful catalogue with its metallic cover. So you saw the musicalsculpture by Duchamp there?

Marcel Duchamp, Untitled(Sculpture musicale), from: The
Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even (The Green Box),
1934

BF: Yes, I was really inspired by that passage in the Green Box, Musical Sculpture,‘Sounds lasting and leaving (4 minutes 17)’, a sculpture that was, for me, almost atheorem for my work.
It made a lot of sense to me at that time as I had started treating these recordings
basically as found objects. I would make a recording and then put it in a cassette—
to be able to play it back at some random place where it was out of context, in orderto observe people’s interactions with the sound and listening space. I was interested
in how most people’s perception of the ambient sound was to regard it as noise andto tune it out. That passage about Duchamp’s musical sculpture made me call mysound intervention pieces ‘sound sculptures’.
HUO: So that´s when you started thinking of the concept of sound sculpture andwhere the definition for your work comes from?
BF: Yes. What I was doing was essentially different than, say, doing concerts.
I started thinking about the meaning of sculpture. To me, it meant some physicalembodiment with an aspect of the human condition. So the first real sound sculptures I made, in the early 1970s, basically consisted of taking several resonant objects,
putting small microphones in the objects, positioning them on the roof of a building,and connecting them to a loudspeaker system in the gallery space below.
I did this, for instance, in an alternative art space called the ‘Experimental Intermedia
Foundation’.
HUO: Would you call this your first valid piece—your number one in your Catalogue
Raisonné ? How did it work, exactly? You explained in an interview that you connected the roof to the inside—and the inside to the outside, is that right?
BF: I was interested in the resonant properties of certain objects, and how theseobjects were, in a sense, listening to the world around. That seemed to symbolise
how I felt about the act of listening, making music as a physical embodiment of that
idea. That’s why these are the first sound sculptures, yes.

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Bill Fontana,
Autor
Hans Ulrich Obrist

HUO: Italo Calvino wrote this beautiful book about the Invisible Cities. I always
thought that the Sonic City1 is somehow part of the Invisible City, because very often
we don’t take notice. I feel that with your work it is . as Paul Klee said, ‘art makes
visible the invisible’—you seem to do that sonically, would you agree?
BF: Yes, absolutely. But… thinking about New York… I was back in New York maybe
three or four years ago, and there was this building I became very interested in, theold Met Life Tower on 23rd Street. It opened around 1909 and was inspired by theCampanile in Venice. At the top of the tower there were four bells that rang theWestminster chimes, and they did that for about 100 years. Then the building was
sold, it is now a luxury hotel, and obviously the bells don’t ring any more. I went up
to where the bells are and did test recordings, where I put these high resolution
vibration sensors on the bells and made recordings of the bells essentially hearing
New York. It seemed just—what began in the early 1970s, with these objects in
the roof of a building—that process continued there. It was just a much moresophisticated, high-tech way of doing that.
HUO: We talked about the way you record. I read that, early on, you also used a toolthat structural engineers use…
BF: An accelerometer.

Accelerometer on the clockworkof Big Ben

HUO: Yes, an accelerometer, something like a vibration sensor. Can you tell me how
you use the accelerometer to find this other dimension? Again, a dimension we don’t
really perceive with our eyes, because we don’t perceive vibrations?
BF: The accelerometer is technically what is called a transducer. It’s normally usedby structural engineers to measure vibration in structures like bridges, for example.
Every airplane you fly on has accelerometers on the engine to monitor whether it’smoving correctly. When they’re building car engines, for instance, they use them. So
they are really designed as measuring tools to get inside the vibrations of structures.
I use them as portals into another dimension, and to explore how physical situations
are connected through vibration, how they react through vibration. I did a project
along these lines here in London with the Millennium Bridge, do you remember thesound sculpture from 2006 in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern?
HUO: Yes, of course.
BF: I installed a network with these sensors on the Millennium Bridge, with the helpof the engineering company that built the bridge. It’s a listening tool that has beenpart of how I work.

1
Sonic City was a soundselection compiled byHans Ulrich Obrist in
the frame of the 2000
Mutation exhibition
curated by Rem Koolhaas, first shown in
Bordeaux.

HUO: In the beginning, it was just with the roof that you recorded, and now you
mentioned the Tate piece: bridges have also played an incredible role in your work.
I searched online—so many of your pieces connect to bridges. Huang Yong Ping, thelate Chinese artist, said we need always at least two points of view, and to bridgethem. Of course, there is your famous bridge in Lisbon, and there is the Tate bridge,
but there are also many, many more. When did the bridges enter your work? What was
the bridge epiphany, and why bridges?
BF: The first bridge appeared in my work in 1977 in an exhibition at a museumin Melbourne called the National Gallery of Victoria. I was working for the ABC

Bill Fontana on the Brooklyn
Bridge, 1983

(Australian Broadcast Corporation) then—and had access to eight to sixteen analogue
channel recorders, so I was able to take these sometimes into environments. This firstbridge I recorded was in a town in Australia, halfway between Sydney and Melbourne,
called Gundagai. There was a large wooden trestle bridge that went over a floodplain.
The sound it made, the rattling of the wooden panels when the car went over it,
I made some recordings of that in 1977. In the US, the first bridge I worked with was
actually in Cincinnati, Ohio—there is a suspension bridge designed by the same guy
who did the Brooklyn Bridge, John August Roebling. I did a real-time sound sculpture
with the bridge in Cincinnati, which was transmitted to the Federal Reserve Plaza.
When the Brooklyn Bridge was a hundred years old, in 1983, I did a similar project andtransmitted live sounds into the façade of World Trade Center. So the sound of the
Brooklyn Bridge was kind of hovering in that space.
HUO: Quite a bit later you did the bridge at the Tate?
BF: Yes, The Tate was in 2006.
HUO: That was, of course, Norman Foster’s Millennium Bridge. How did you do theTate piece?
BF: I was a frequent visitor to London at that time, and I always travel with some kindof recording device. I had accelerometers, and I started my own experiments withmaking test recordings, putting accelerometers and cables on the Millennium Bridge.
This seemed really amazing to me. I started to dream about making this artwork, but I
also had good fortune. In a lecture at a conference about sound art in 2004, I played
an example of my test recordings of the Millennium Bridge. It happened that an
acoustic engineer from Arup Engineering, the company that had built the Millennium
Bridge, heard it. He had a lot of experience analysing the wobbling that the bridge
used to do, but he never listened to the accelerometer recordings, which is data forhim. So he was very excited when he heard these, and said to me: ‘What do you thinkwould be interesting to do?’ I said: ‘I want to bring sound into the Turbine Hall’. So
what his company did for me was that they do work for architects who build concert
halls and buildings, and they’ve got this incredible acoustic simulation lab. They canmake a model of the acoustic space, and then take a sound and place it in the model,

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Bill Fontana,
Autor
Hans Ulrich Obrist

and simulate what it sounds like. One of the head guys from Arup was on the boardof the Tate. We invited Nicholas Serota to come to this lab and hear the simulation of
the Millennium Bridge sound piece I was trying to do, and how it would sound in the
Turbine Hall. On the spot Nicholas Serota said, ‘I want to do this’.
HUO: The installation became a really fascinating experience that I connect to thetime I moved to London in 2006.
BF: Currently I am negotiating with the Tate to give them a permanent, recorded
version of the piece that they might install on top of the Turbine Hall.
HUO: I have often discussed the lack of sound museums, comparing this fact to the1990s, when video was still very much marginalised. Jonas Mekas, for example, wasvery upset with the Whitney showing videos in some other rooms as a programmeduring the Whitney Biennial. Nobody saw those films in the exhibition context, where
they had only painting and sculpture. Today that has changed, now there are video
rooms in every museum. Yet sonic works are still often absent from collections, andI was wondering about your perspective on that. I feel it will most probably change in
the next 10 years—it is the next frontier. Sound in a museum or a collection context
is still somehow unresolved. I was wondering if you believe that there should be a
specialised museum of sound? Or do you think that sound works should just enter
existing museums? How do you feel about collecting sound works?
BF: I have the experience of having some of my sound pieces in museum collections.
I think that probably one of the most interesting of these is in Rome, in a museum
called MAXXI …
HUO: ... by Zaha Hadid.
BF: Yes, she did the architecture. And I did this pretty large-scale immersive andpermanent sound piece for her large entrance hall. The piece that flows throughHadid’s ‘kinetic’ architecture is based on recordings I made, many of them in thestreets in Rome, and on an old Roman aqueduct called the Aqua Vergine. Visitors
really experienced that piece in space and its surroundings .
HUO: I have experienced it—it is indeed exciting and merges effortlessly with thesituation.
BF: Even if SFMOMA in San Francisco also have some works of mine in their collection,
as well as the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, which has two sound pieces
in its collection—what you say is still interesting and right: Sound art in collec­tions isstill in its beginning stages. For the whole process of collecting: I have been operating
independently mostly all of my career. The only time I had a gallery was when Haunchof Venison gallery existed in London, and I think they kind of struggled with what to
do with sound art. I always felt like I was, in some ways, a token sound artist for them.
I still feel that there is a certain ambivalence about a gallery working with sound art.
HUO: Another interesting aspect of your works is the treatment of the urban as muchthe rural. Rem Koolhaas said: ‘The countryside is kind of a blind spot’. Nowadays wetalk so much about the city that we have barely any images of the countryside. Whichis why he is now doing a big exhibition on the countryside for the Guggenheim. We
don’t have as many images of the countryside as we do of the city. And this is alsoBill Fontana in the AustralianOutback, 1977

true for sounds: sounds of the countryside are much less present than sounds of thecity. You have worked in cities, in the countryside. In deserts even. When did you start
to think beyond the city?
BF: It began, I think, in Australia, because the landscape in Australia is such a vast
countryside. Cities are only a small part of that country: it is about the size of theUnited States and has maybe the population of New York City. So I did a lot ofrecordings of the Australian countryside.
HUO: Can you tell me about those?
BF: I have one vivid memory of driving along a country highway. At the side of theroad there was a large herd of sheep, and the sheep were agitated, making the kind of‘baa’ sounds that sheep make. Their problem was that they were being attacked by aflock of magpies, and the magpies were also making a special kind of sound. So it was
a combination of this moment in time, of an unhappy herd of sheep being attacked
by a flock of magpies, and the sound of that moment was very special. Then in the
distance you would occasionally hear the sound of a gear shifting on a large semitrailer truck, and that mixture was so special … this was a moment. Another moment,
I was in a field near a forest and because there were some interesting birds. I set up
the microphones so that the recorders would record them. I was stepping away andby accident, or destiny, there were a couple of cows that started walking near where
my microphone was in this field. I got the gradually increasing sound of those cows
walking through the grass, approaching the microphone.
HUO: Chris Watson made me aware of the importance of the sound of animals. In
that context I think of your extraordinary piece in Cologne in the Kolumba Museum
restored (1997–2007) by Peter Zumthor. I remember that when I was in Cologne in
the 1980s or 90s, there were pigeons all over the mostly destroyed old town… For
your piece that is now in the museum, which merges old and new, you recorded those
pigeons.

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Bill Fontana,
Autor
Hans Ulrich Obrist

BF: Yes, in the 1980s I worked in Cologne, where I did sound art projects (with the
WDR, for example) and was a known artist in that community. In 1994, when I was
living in Paris, I therefore got an invitation from the Museum of the Archbishop of
Cologne to visit what was soon going to be a construction site for their amazing
diocesan collection. The site was the mostly destroyed St. Kolumba. Since ‘columba’means dove or pigeon in Latin and is the bird of peace, they wanted me to document
the sounds of the pigeons living there before it became a construction site.
So I brought a multichannel digital recorder to Cologne and circled my way aroundthe Kolumba, making hours of recordings of the pigeons. Then the museum openedin 2007, and I designed this sound piece in that incredible space out of theold recordings.
HUO: So because of your piece, those long-gone pigeons are still there.
BF: Do you know the Vienna piece Landscape Soundings, which I did in 1990? It was
installed in Maria-Theresien-Platz, between the Art History Museum and the Natural
History Museum. In the mid-1980s the Austrian government was discussing thebuilding of a hydroelectric power plant in the east of Austria, which would have reallydamaged the Danube.
The Hainburger Au was very much in the news then, and the theme of the Vienna festival
in May 99 was ‘kunst und natur’, ‘art and nature’. The idea came about with Heidi
Grundmann, a producer from Austrian state radio, who did public art projects. With
the help of the Austrian radio we selected a forest in the Danube wetland, installed a
network of 16 microphones there, and transmitted the live sounds into the heartof Vienna.
HUO: So the work then was also a form of protest to force the government toabandon the idea?
BF: Yes. The sounds that came to Vienna were directly transmitted to 70 loudspeakers
in the façades of these museums and to some of the lighting features on the groundof the park between the buildings. The space was filled with the living voice of thisamazing wetland of the Danube. It was definitely striking. Today I am thinking ofreworking this idea for an exhibition dealing with the idea of an age of trees. I’m using
accelerometers and am actually listening through the trees. Then, it didn’t even occur
to me that we would listen to the trees of the wetlands too.
HUO: So that brings us to the trees—a big theme right now, also because of extinction,
since trees are probably the only chance we have of saving the planet in terms ofclimate change, through the massive reforestation of billions of trees. Can you tell me
about the recording of trees?
BF: I feel it is important to go deeper and look closer because of the climate change
issues, and their urgency. I wanted to make an artwork that would really bring out theliving voice of one of these very important old world forests. Last time I worked withthe forest it was very good in terms of rendering the kind of acoustic sounds you havein that kind of environment. But what was missing was the trees themselves. This
time I see it as a great opportunity to put this technology—the accelerometer technology—on the trunks of trees that are several thousand years old; not only to hearsome kind of internal vibrations that the trees have from the wind and weather, butmore importantly, I regard a tree of that type as an amazing natural and liveorganisation. In California, in Sequoia National Park, you’ve got trees that are theGiant tree in Sequoia
National Parc, California

height of a 10-storey building and 3,000 years old. The massive body of such an oldtree is an incredible resonance structure, and if you put accelerometers high up on
the trunk, where it is more elastic, the trunk is going to react to the sounds of theenvironment around it, like interesting bird calls. The massive tree trunk has a harmonic
structure with resonant frequency and overtones. The second the trunk vibrates, weessentially hear sounds in a very musical way. When the forest or the wildlife produces
an acoustic sound, any of those frequencies match the harmonic structure of the tree
trunk. The accelerometers will hear through the trunk that reacts as a kind of resonant
filter to the surroundings. Like this, you really hear the inner voice of a tree.
HUO: This means in your work we are basically in the tree?
BF: Yes, you can experience the sound of the forest from the perspective of a tree.
HUO: In this catalogue from Vienna, it seems you actually prompted a question:
This idea of the score … not actually writing sheet music, yet at the same time acomposition.
BF: I did sheet music when I was in Cleveland.
HUO: Only sheet music?
BF: Well, I wrote scores; a string quartet, some piano music … I wanted to be acomposer.
HUO: Do they still exist?
BF: In my archive.
HUO: Has it been published?
BF: No.

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Bill Fontana,
Autor
Hans Ulrich Obrist

Bill Fontana in Radio OB van on
Roncalliplatz, Metropolis Köln,
1987

Excerpt from the score MusicalSculpture for Carillon, 1988

HUO: So, what is your early music like?
BF: It’s pretty minimal. I was always interested in spatial relations. I have a piece forfour pianos. I also have a sound sculpture for a brass band, which is a piece that is tobe performed outdoors. I wrote some very minimal orchestral pieces that employedspreading the instruments of the orchestras out to create a spatial piece. That was
really the orientation of my thinking.
HUO: Now, for all your later works, do you do scores?
BF: Yes, I make them for myself, really.
They are a combination of technical diagrams. Something that looks like this …

Cologne. I was working at this broadcasting company, and I would install a couple ofthe hydrophones in the ground to hear the movement of the rivers, ship engines andwater. That was the first time, but the more dramatic example was in Paris, in 1994.
HUO: You refer to a public art project on the façade of the Arc de Triomphe.
BF: Yes, it was a sound sculpture commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture,
for the 50th anniversary of D-Day. I installed a live network of acoustic microphones
and hydrophones on the Normandy coast which transmitted the sounds to an eightchannel system on the façade of the Arc de Triomphe. So, basically, the live sound of
the sea wrapped around the Arc De Triomphe. The sound .
HUO: .inundated it?

HUO: Like a timeline?
BF: It´s a kind of like a timeline that indicates a mix of different positions of sounds
over a period. Different combinations, like these .
HUO: The question of the score is really intriguing. Here you show a noise with aquestion mark at minute 18:39, and at minute 26, there is an airplane. [B laughs]
HUO: And there is a long water line. So it’s like a palimpsest.
BF: Yes, that’s what a mixing programme does.

BF: Yes, if you stood on the island of the Arc de Triomphe, you were no longer able tohear the noise of the traffic.
HUO: And then there is, of course, your work connected to architecture. You haveinteracted with Frank Gehry at the SFMOMA and in Miami. Then you worked with the
Whitney Museum in 1991, an interaction between you and Marcel Breuer. We spoke
about Hadid. Can you tell me your focus when you react to architecture? At the Whitney
Museum, you really altered the context, you actually ‘brought’ the Niagara Falls.
BF: The reason I did something there was very simple. The media curator of the
Whitney was interested in having a work of mine at the Biennial.

HUO: Of course, you use acoustic microphones. But you also record underwater.
BF: Yes, underwater recordings have played an important role since I’ve been usinghydrophones.
The first time I started using hydrophones was in Cologne, because I was doing a
project in Cologne with the radio station, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (Metropolis Köln,
1985/1987?). I did this kind of real-time sound portrait—a sound map of the city of

HUO: You talk about John G. Hanhardt, the pioneering curator of new media who wasfor instance, also an an early supporter of Nam June Paik.
BF: Hanhardt was a real advocate for sound art. He invited me to the Whitney Biennial after he had seen the piece with the Brooklyn Bridge on the façade of the World
Trade Center in 1983. In 1985, he showed a sound piece of mine in the media room,180 — 181
Bill Fontana,
Autor
Hans Ulrich Obristproduced in Australia in 1976, a recording of wave patterns in Sydney Harbour called
Kirribilli Wharf. He then invited me in 1991 to do a piece for the Biennial outdoors. The
Breuer building has this kind of courtyard in the basement under the façade. Whileasking myself what sound piece I could do outdoors on Madison Avenue I came tothink of the sound of moving water that produces natural white noise. I had a postcard
image of the Breuer building, I put it upside down—and it suggested a waterfall to me.
So, Niagara Falls were some of the most interesting waterfalls that I could think ofusing at that time. I went and made extensive recordings of the Niagara Falls andinstalled a sound system at the Whitney Museum. It’s because of that piece that
I had the chance to do the piece in Paris, with the Arc de Triomphe.
HUO: It’s probably one of your most famous pieces.
Another particularly striking piece is your project at the San Francisco Museum ofModern Art, where the sound ‘leaks’ out of the main building.
BF: Yes, into an inner courtyard. There is a bridge on the top floor below the Oculus
where I was using a special kind of audio technology, because there were otherultrasonic transducers that projected sound waves like lasers into the space,reflecting off the walls. In the boiler room, I installed accelerometers and machinerythat would hear all the plumbing and the moving water in the system there.
HUO: What about your connection to Frank Gehry?
BF: Well, I met him in Los Angeles and I had the opportunity in Miami Beach to do a
project on one of his buildings, the New World Center. Because it’s a concert hall, thearchitecture of that building has one wall that is designed for video projection.
HUO: It´s the outside wall facing the park. Where people go to eat lunch, hang out.
BF: Right. There is also a permanent TV channel and sound system in the park. The
symphony uses it to show concerts on the video wall and play the sound. But a lotof the time the system is not used. The City of Miami Beach wanted an artist with apermanent artwork for that situation—and they commissioned me. I was interested
in the issues involved in the relationship of South Florida to the coast around it, andthe sense of impending doom. I thought of the rising sea levels and I wanted to makean artwork that explored that relationship. I did a lot of filming and sound recording
in many different situations in South Florida, exploring the relationship between the
coast and the sea. I put accelerometers on structures floating in the water, against
the water, and hydrophones on the water, I also had acoustic microphones. I unravelled and found interesting sonic texture with musical language, and the videos were
all collages I made, gazing at the situation and layering parts of an image of itself.

Shadow Soundings, MAAT,
Lisb­on, 2017/18, installation view

BF: They asked me to make a piece for the museum because, when I was in New York,I met the first director of the museum, Pedro Gadanho. He asked me in 2016 about
doing a sound piece, maybe a sound-video piece in Lisbon for the 25 de Abril Bridge.
We agreed I would make my first ever site visit to Lisbon, and work on the construction site of the museum. I came up with the idea of taking this large space at MAAT’s
Oval Gallery and making an artwork with that bridge for 2018. Coincidentally, thename of the bridge, the 25th of April, also happens to be my birthday.
I made quite a few trips to Lisbon over a period of a year and a half, and spent a lotof time making recordings and studies of that bridge. While working I had reactions
to the installations in the building, with the architecture. In the end, the piece was
essentially a real-time media artwork. With two concentric rings of speakers they
were able to recreate the bridge in the museum. I installed a combination of acoustic
microphones and accelerometers on the bridge. It was a real-time data stream sound,with the ability to have a live camera. One of the live cameras was on the bridge.
I chose that camera to be on top of the tower of the bridge, which gave a reallyamazing perspective. I really wanted to have a sonic choreography in the space. I was
lucky that there was a sound company from California that I worked with a lot, called
Meyer Sound. They have this digital audio platform called ‘D-Mitri’ where, if you havea large number of speakers in a space like that—maybe 60 speakers—you canpurposely create a sonic choreography by actually drawing.
HUO: The ‘D-Mitri’ programme is like a control brain?

HUO: Is it called Sonic Dreamscapes?
BF: The work goes in between. While making recordings, there is a sort of suspensionof time, where time—normal time—stops. This experience has a kind of perpetualmotion to it. I was trying to create media artworks that would get people to think ofwhat surrounds them, but also get immersed into something evocative. Maybe maketime stop for them, a little.
HUO: Another of your cooperations with architecture recently is the MAAT in Lisbon,
incredible architecture by Amanda Levete.

BF: It’s very sophisticated. Each sound has its individual orbit through the speakermatrix.
HUO: You have used that technology before, for the Pritzker Pavilion in the MillenniumPark in Chicago. Another interesting connection to Gehry´s architecture.
BF: Yes, I was teaching at the artist studio in Chicago. It was another gallery
cooperation. As part of my presence in Chicago they wanted me to create an artwork.
I was fascinated by the pavilion’s remarkable design, where you’ve got this trellis

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Bill Fontana,
Autor
Hans Ulrich Obrist

Bill Fontana and Clemens Mairworking on a video during the
preparations for the exhibition
Primal Energies, Graz, summer
2017

Project Library on Bill Fontana’s
website, resoundings.org

that extends from the stage out into the park and carries 104 downwards facing
loudspeakers on it. My reaction to the situation was to produce a sound sculpture outof different recordings I made in Chicago earlier and to use the new technology of the
D-Mitri system. I remember sitting in Millennium Park under the trellis with my laptop,
computer, and drawing—really drawing—sound movements. As I was drawing them,
I could really hear them from the 102 speakers and their different locations. I drew
and controlled the speed, and was basically building the spatial composition throughthe act of drawing.
HUO: You have recently not only included cutting-edge technology, but also video. In
Portugal, for example, you combined moving image with sounds from the outside. In
a recent interview2 you said that you work backwards for this. You create the soundfirst, and then you add the moving image. We are mostly used to sound following
film. Movies, for example, add soundtracks to the image. But in your case, film follows
sound. Can you explain that? What was the epiphany of bringing in the moving image
to your sound?
BF: The first time was in 2008 and it started because of the development of cameras.
From the beginning of my recordings I would always take some pictures of the situations where I was recording sound. So, from the time you could actually do video withthe camera I was carrying, I started shooting videos. I started thinking of the moving
image as a time-based medium, approaching it in the way I use sound.
The first time I exhibited a work with sound and video was actually at the Haunch of
Venison gallery in 2008.
HUO: In your first ever commercial gallery?
2‘Bill Fontana: Miami
sound machine’, in:
The Art Newspaper,
december 2018. Seetheartnewspaper.com/
interview/bill-fontanamiami-sound-machine(accessed 04.02.2020).

BF: Yes, when they once asked me if there was a way of having visual elements in
my work I had this idea of going back to Japan to make some new recordings oflarge Buddhist temple bells in Kyoto and Tokyo. The first audio-visual work I did
was very simple. Basically, there was a camera staring at the beautiful hanging Buddhist temple bells. The sound was just the sound of silence of the bell, not ringing.

Nevertheless, with the accelerometer on it you can hear the resonance of the bellreacting to whatever surrounds it. At the Haunch of Venison, you’d go into a room andhave this life-sized projection of a beautiful Buddhist temple bell, and you’d have thisincredible sound that filled the room. There were several rooms with different bells,
and they managed to actually sell one or two editions with that piece. Then in 2010,
I did an exhibition at Somerset House about the Thames. It was installed on the lower
level. At Somerset House you’ve got this large plaza as you enter from the Strand.
The perimeter of the courtyard one level down is this walkway at the level of theThames. When the building was created originally as the headquarters for the British
Navy during the Napoleonic wars, that area was full of storage chambers for goods,
weapons and in each of those caves—they’re called ‘coalholes’—I installed video
projections of different situations on the Thames. The piece was pretty immersive,with all these sounds of the different parts of the Thames moving through thesurrounding walkway.
HUO: As your work connects to developments in technology, and as Tim Berners-Lee
invented the World Wide Web in 1989—we have just celebrated its 30th anniversary—
I would like to ask you about the influence of the Internet on your work? You have an
extraordinary website, it is one of the best artist’s websites. It includes a lot of yourfilms. It’s extremely complete and even has an own name, ‘Resoundings’, right?
BF: I started to build my website in 1999, when I had a sound sculpture at the Venice
Biennale installed on the façade of the Punta della Dogana, and Peggy Guggenheim
helped organise that. It was a sound sculpture that explored the idea of hearing as
far as you can see. I had live microphones and used them with the immense visualpanorama that you’d see from the Dogana. I had microphones in 12 to 16 places.
The sound of these locations—an abstraction of the visual panorama—was transferred
to loudspeakers on the façade of the building. When you create a website, you haveto register a domain name, and I registered resoundings.org. I liked the word ‘resoundings’—that’s really what I am doing, in a sense.
HUO: Why do you like this word, why does it summarise your practice?

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Bill Fontana,
Autor
Hans Ulrich Obrist

BF: Well, so much about my artistic practice is taking sounds from one place andre-sounding them in another context. So to me, as a word, it really summarises what
so much of my work has been.
HUO: Have you ever thought of painting or sculpting?
BF: In my early days in Cleveland. I also have a lot of friends who were art students,and for a brief period of my life I wanted to be a painter. People who have seen a lot of
the recent videos I am doing, their reaction to it was that I was painting with light.
HUO: These exist too? These paintings?
BF: I have them in my archive, yes. I have never shown them.
HUO: Let’s talk about the new show in Graz.
BF: Have you ever seen the building in Graz?
HUO: Yes, I know Graz well. When Peter Pakesch was director of the Joanneum I was
invited to do a talk with Michelangelo Pistoletto on social sculpture and the Cittadellarte. I also went to interview Günther Brus, the legendary Viennese Actionist who isfrom Graz. A part of the Joanneum is now dedicated to him.
The building that you will now work in is by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, it´s one of
the few built structures by Cook, who is mostly known for his unbuilt work. He was afounding member of the 1960s neo-futurist architecture group Archigram, and also
an amazingly influential teacher. Can you tell us about what you are going to do withPrimal Energies and Sonic Projections?
BF: It’s an exhibition that is, in some ways, a reflection on a lot of ideas, andespecially on ideas about the environment.
HUO: So it is connected to ecology?
BF: Very much so. The exhibition will combine sound and moving image. It’s going
to be in that large gallery space on the top floor. When the curator Katrin Bucher
Trantow invited me to do something in that space, we were both thinking about
learning from the experience in Lisbon, which was on a similar kind of spatial scale,and wanted to bring it together with the local situation in Graz and the globally
important environmental questions concerning the production of energy. There willprobably be eight to twelve hanging screens with projections on them in the space,and all the images will be from different environmental situations I have worked with.
In the large space, as with the work in Lisbon, there will be something like 50 or 60
loudspeakers, and the sound can move around in the space.
A lot of what I am focussing on is renewable energy situations. As something like
80% of Austria’s electricity comes from hydroelectric power, I have done a lot ofrecordings of Austria’s hydroelectric power situations—there are beautiful hydroelectric power plants not far from Graz, where I did water recordings. On our tours
we detected that the Austrian power company Verbund had set up a pilot project at
a local power plant, using sounds in order to monitor the integrity of the turbines.
When I saw that they used simple aerial microphones I proposed using accelerometers for their measurements, and the researchers were indeed excited when they
heard what they could pick up.

Bill Fontana, Hydro PowerLandscape, 2019 (video still)

One of the pieces in the space will be from there. It will be a large vertical image
based on a video I made of the hydroelectric power plant. The sound I’m using wasrecorded with hydrophones hearing the sound of the turbines.
HUO: Like a Rorschach test.
BF: In addition to the Primal Energies show, they want to re-enact the Sonic Projections,a public art project I did in Graz in 1988, which caused a lot of trouble. There was an
exhibition at the steirischer herbst festival, reflecting on the 50-year anniversary of
the Anschluss. Graz has this history of the ‘city of the Volkserhebung’, the voluntary
joining with Nazi Germany, so in 1988 a few daring curators like Werner Fenz andHeidi Grundman from ORF Radio invited artists for public art projects and to talkabout it.
When I went to Graz, I had the feeling that especially older people in Graz didn’t wantto know anything about this exhibition. They didn’t want to think about their history.
So I thought that a sound is something that you couldn’t ignore. I used thiswell-known landmark, the Schloßberg, this romantic-looking bell tower on thehighest point in the centre of Graz. We installed loudspeakers and projected sounds
over the landscape. They were nice sounds, not designed to be aggressive. But it
became a symbol of the exhibition, and it caused …
HUO: ... a fuss.
BF: Yes. But now, for their ‘Year of Culture’, they want it back!
HUO: This piece for Graz seems to be a good example of your methodology. On yourwebsite there is also a manifesto text, where you say that you create live listening
networks. So, you create a live listening network for Graz: ‘These all use a hybrid mixof transmission technologies that connect multiple sound retrieval points to a central
reception point. What is significant in this process are the conceptual links determining the relationships between the selected listening points and the site-specificqualities of the reception point (sculpture site). Some conceptual strategies have

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Bill Fontana, Hans
Autor
Ulrich Obrist

been acoustic memory, the total transformation of the visible (retinal) by the invisible(sound), hearing as far as one can see, the relationship of the speed of sound to the
speed of light, and the deconstruction of our perception of time.’ All of that seems tobe true for Graz.
BF: Yes, absolutely, but it has been true for all of my work in recent years.
HUO: It went from the Walkman to the iPhone—now people listen to almost every­
thing on the iPhone. Of course, your work also breaks this bubble, because people areoften in this bubble and don’t notice what is around us. But would it be possible tosomehow bring it back, bring your work to mobile listening? Have you ever thought ofmaking mobile pieces? Could you even imagine a Bill Fontana app?
BF: In a way, in the 1970s and 80s, before all this happened, I was already using radio
like that. The sound art works I did for radio really brought the sound to you. People
listening to radios, thousands and millions of different contacts at the same time—it
felt like a chance to make temporary sound sculptures in many places at the sametime, as the sounds would logically interact with the situations that people would
happen to be in. When, in 1982, I had a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the US, it produced 365 formatted radio programmes that were basicallystructured for three-and-a-half minutes to hear sound without any explanation. Only
afterwards there would be a voice to tell you what you had been hearing. This
programme was distributed all over the United States on the public radio network.
Just this idea that, through the medium of radio, you can kind of place a soundin all these different situations. But what you are saying about the iPhone app issomething very thought-provoking, it might be something I’d like to explore.
HUO: Speaking of radio pieces, they have often been a laboratory for literature—thelegendary Austrian writer Friederike Mayröcker has done many amazing radio plays—
for art. Can you give us another example of one of your pieces for radio?
BF: Two come to mind. I did a sound sculpture in Berlin in 1984 at the Anhalter
Bahnhof: I took the sound of the Cologne main train station and planted loudspeakers
buried in the empty field behind the Anhalter Bahnhof. What the Westdeutscher
Rundfunk did, as a partner in this, was that people alive in Berlin in 1984 who hada memory of the Anhalter Bahnhof as a train station would go to that site, and theyrecorded interviews. In 1987 I did this piece called the Soundbridge Cologne – SanFrancisco. It basically connected two real-time sound pieces, one at SFMOMA with
the Golden Gate Bridge, and one at the Museum Ludwig with a live sound art piece
about Cologne. I did this kind of radio concert mixing sounds live, and it was distributed all over Europe and North America, and even to Australia via satellite.
HUO: Please tell me about your archive. Where is it?
BF: It’s online and in my house in San Francisco, in my studio.
HUO: Jonas Mekas urged us to have things in different places. How do you archive
your work?
BF: Well, what I do is that I have three servers, and I store a lot of files on the servers.
What´s also useful for me is, if I am working with somebody on a project, I can havea file that is not on a website and I can send a link to someone to see or hear it. I use

Bill Fontana in front of theAnhalter Bahnhof in Berlin, 1984

it as a way of storing a lot of data, a lot of files. It´s kind of an ongoing and labourintensive process. During this work I have often had the idea to take some of the workand maybe sell it as editions. From the money I would perhaps create a foundation.
HUO: That´s one of your unrealised ideas then. I wanted to ask you about these. What
projects were too big, or too small, or too expensive to be realised?
BF: Ever since the idea of a project for the Hayward on listening through ancient trees
came to my mind, I am possessed with it. I would love to do it, but due to time issues
I am not sure if it can happen. Apart from this I had a public commission in New York
City that failed due to money issues, but would have been amazing. I wanted to doa large sound piece bringing elements of the New York Harbour and its surroundings
into a public space.
HUO: Any other projects?
BF: I had the idea to turn the new Berlin Hauptbahnhof into a kind of musicalinstrument for the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, working with accelerometers. The
sounds of the structure of the new station would be interesting, and it would beremarkable to rebuild that station acoustically into the former station and contemporary exhibition space of the Hamburger Bahnhof. So far I didn’t get the mostfavourable reaction. What fascinates me about using these accelerometers andrecording vibrations inside a structure, or now in an ancient tree . is that it gives me
the feeling of perpetual motion. It’s like there is a sense that certain sounds neverstop, they keep going. A bit like looking at the night sky, and it’s infinite.
HUO: It’s cosmic.
BF: Cosmic, yes. An accelerometer placed on a 3,000-year-old tree is hearing a soundthat never stops, and is a portal to infinity.