198 — 199
Autor‘Becoming fully present’hour. These included foghorns from San Francisco Bay, bells from Kyoto and birdsong
from the Australian rainforest. Using what were then cutting-edge recording devices,
loudspeakers and radio technology, these sounds were combined with the eightsound-delayed live recordings of places of historical significance around the city intoa live mix in the radio studio. The studio was set up in the Landhaus—which once
served as headquarters for the fascists—and, for one day, the acoustic map createdby the overlapping was broadcast to the whole of Austria. Although it had sought toreconcile the past with the healing present, Fontana’s sound portrait of the city met
with a heated climate of defensiveness. As a result, the ‘beastly shame’—as the work
was dubbed by the Neue Zeit newspaper 3—was vandalised after just a few days andconsequently was cancelled by city politicians. Despite—or perhaps even becauseof—the explosive poignancy felt at that time, for many people those sounds from the
Schlossberg still linger as a melancholic memory.

Katrin Bucher Trantow‘I am assuming that at any given moment there will be something meaningful to hear.
I am in fact assuming that music, in the sense of meaningful sound patterns, is anatural process that is going on constantly.’ 4‘There was a strange stillness.
The birds, for example—where had they gone?’ 1

Since the beginnings of his artistic work, Fontana has been moved by the possibilityof a holistic perception of the ‘overlooked’. Beyond instrumented and composedmusic, this is about conscious listening and making us aware of the sound qualities
and harmonies in everyday life. Using technical instruments and unfamiliar localization, he makes the acoustic properties of landscapes, places, objects, and especiallybuildings into an audible and accessible experience. As in the case of Sonic Projections, Fontana often uses the indirect environment as the source of his musical information. A level of abstraction arises from the shift of location and naming, conjuring
up strong visual images.

When, in 1962, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring triggered the beginning ofenvironmental awareness—and in particular, an awareness of a whole, cyclical andlarge, noisy web of life—it was certainly also her powerful verbal images that drew
millions of readers across the world. Carson’s vision of a looming deathly silence
continues to speak volumes today.
Bill Fontana grew up in an age of growing environmental awareness, at the beginningof the 1960s, a Cleveland boy with an interest in music. His family lived in aneighbourhood situated between an industrial zone and a concert hall. This intensive
experience of a world around him suffused both with music and the noise of
production had an impact that was to shape his whole life.
‘The task of acoustic art and acoustic design is to fundamentally challenge all of theold historical definitions of noise and the resulting preconceptions that most people
have about the sounds they live with’.2

1
From: Rachel Carso­n,
Silent Spring,
1962/2002, Boston/
New York, p. 2.
2Bill Fontana, ‘Zeitgleich’symposium, Hallin Tirol, 1994, on http://
www.kunstradio.at/
ZEITGLEICH/index.html(accessed 02.03.2019).

The epochal steirischer herbst festival, Bezugspunkte 38/88, explored Austria’s1938 ‘Anschluss’ to national-socialist Germany, a topic commonly repressed until
1988. Sound artist Bill Fontana installed a sound work in the city centre that is still
remembered by many local people to this day: Sonic Projections from Schloßberg
Graz was an urban ‘multi-channel installation’ that transmitted sounds from the topof the hill down into the town, and mixed live noises of the city with recorded sounds
from all over the world. Invited by Graz curator Werner Fenz and Heidi Grundmannfrom ‘Kunstradio/Radiokunst’ at ORF, Fontana came to Austria for the first time. In
the following year—also at Grundmann’s initiative—he transmitted the sounds of the
Danube wetland landscape to Vienna, between the Kunsthistorisches and Naturhistorisches museums; this happened immediately after a debate about the constructionof a hydropower plant there. In Graz, the Schloßberg clocktower was once saved fromdestruction by Napoleon, and so became a local symbol of resistance. In 1988,
Fontana took sounds gathered from all over the world and transmitted them into
the city from the Schlossberg for a period of five days, for several minutes each3
Walter Müller, ‘Eine
Affenschande’, Neue
Zeit, 18.10.1988, p. 9.
4
From: Bill Fontana,
The Environment asa Musical Resource,
1990, published online,
https://resoundings.
org/Pages/musical%20
resource.html (accessed
07.02.2020).
5
Letter from John Cage,viewed by the author inBill Fontana’s archive,
15.12.2018.

Fontana grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and showed an early interest in music. As ateenager he played the piano and clarinet, and from 1965 to 1968 studied musicat the Cleveland Institute of Music as well as philosophy at the John Carroll
University Cleveland, focusing on Wittgenstein’s logic and language analysis. In 1968
he enrolled at one of the most prominent universities of the time: the New School for
Social Research in New York. There he studied composition—on a course shaped byJohn Cage, who taught there from 1950 to 1960 and was in contact with the university and with Fontana—together with philosophy. At that time the leading figures inConceptual Art, experimental music and Fluxus Art taught at the New School. Years
later Cage also supported him as a mentor for the project at the Golden Gate Bridgein San Francisco (1985/86) and wrote a letter of recommendation emphasizing thequality of his work, which he said ‘married’5 natural sounds like birdsong and therushing sea with the metallic noises made by the stretching structures of the famous
bridge.
As a student he was greatly influenced and supported by Philip Corner, Dick Higgens(who in 1963 founded the groundbreaking Fluxus journal Something Else Press) andhis partner Alison Knowles, whose performative work focuses on the perceptions ofeveryday phenomena as independent events and aesthetic experience. It was theirperspective on the notion of a unity of art and life that led Fontana to the convictionthat while all sounds—as Cage stated—were already there, we just could not perceive
them, since our ‘Gestalt’-programmed perception—determined by the dominance ofthe visual sense—excludes them. The consequence of this is to singularize and todecontextualize everyday sounds so that they from pictures in your head. Language

200 — 201
Katrin Bucher
Autor
Trantow

Bill Fontana in the AustralianOutback, 1976

this time Fontana also learned of the Balinese tradition of gamelan, in which music isregarded as a medium employed to make the flow of all cosmic energies audible. Fontana has devoted himself to this task throughout his oeuvre, and evokes it again in
his Primal Energies installation at the Kunsthaus Graz in 2020.

seems to be the first option for this, and sound recordings of their reproductions withlocation shifts the second.
A significant contribution has been made to this working method by the steady
growth of consumer technology such as the tape recorders and contact microphonesthat Fontana uses to make a wide range of objects audible and perceptible.

6
See http://www.
aknowles.com/gentle.
html (accessed:
02.03.2020).

Shortly after he graduated in 1970, Fontana worked as musical director of the Toronto
Free Theatre and designed sound exhibits for the Ontario Science Center. In 1973 hebegan working with his former professors Alison Knowles and Pilip Corner which led
to the installation of Sound Sculpture with Resonators at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York in 1974. At the same time they collaborated on Gentle
Surprises for the Ear, an interactive performance ahich brought him to Denmark in
1975: the piece consisted of a series of everyday objects laid out and suspended
around a darkened room and ticketed with handwritten directions to touch them, or
to check out their musical properties as described. A random concert with intermediary experience developed in the space and through interaction with the public.6 At

From 1975 to 1978 Fontana lived in Australia, where he began systematic soundworks and recordings, and came into contact with radio as a medium of communication and an artistic space for the first time. He produced a comprehensive set ofrecordings of everyday noises from various places on the Australian continent for theAustralian Broadcasting Company (ABC). His work with experimental radio allowed
him to buy and use the latest sound equipment and led to his most exciting workof the 1970s: Total Eclipse, SE Australia, October 23rd 1976 is the striking acoustic
record of a total solar eclipse, an extremely rare occurrence that is generally
perceived first and foremost visually. Not due to happen at the same spot again
for many years, the event was documented and broadcast by Fontana live from therainforest. His recordings revealing the animals’ acoustic behaviour during and after
the eclipse—from the wild clamour of the birdsong and rustle of the trees through tocomplete silence, and finally the tentative reawakening of the forest—were transmitted via radio into the urban reality of Sydney. This transmission of the recorded natural sound to a place defined by man is a crucial component of the spatial experienceof his sound sculptures, which essentially occur in people’s visual imagination. Before
the listeners’ inner eyes their own visions unfold, as with my visions of colourful, iridescent birds in the green undergrowth being silenced as gradually all becomes still,slowly sinking into the dark.
As a consequence of this experience taking place in our imaginations and overlappingwith our own situation, which expands in time, Fontana called his works Sound
Sculptures, so using the relatively new conceptual construction from the combination202 — 203
Katrin Bucher
Autor
Trantowof visual and auditory vocabulary.7 It refers to the spatial and temporal manifestationof sound that he has carried with him as a concept since reading Duchamp’s notes atthe exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age in New York.
‘Musical Sculpture
lasting andSounds leaving fromdifferent places andformingsounding
a sculpture which lasts.’ 8

7
Other artists such as
Alvin Lucier and Harry
Bertoia also began to
use this term at thesame time. See: Alvin
Lucier, Music on a longthin wire, 1977, see:
Alan Licht, Sound art:
Origins, development,
and ambiguities, online
publishing 2009, p. 9,
see. http://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/
organized-sound/article/
sound-art-developmentsand-ambiguities(accessed 07.02.2020).
8
From Duchamp’s ‘Green
Box’ The Bride Stripped
Bare by her Bachelors,
Even (1934), quoted inBill Fontana, Resoundings, a text on the occasion of the productionof the sound sculpture
Pigeon Soundings in
the Cologne DiocesanMuseum St. Kolumban;
Original recordings
from 1994 made before
the reconstruction, as
an installation in the
new construction since2007. see. http://www.
resoundings.org/Pages/
Resoundings.html(accessed 20.03.2019).
9
Bill Fontana as partof his talk within theframework of theinternational conferenceMusic and Landscape.
Soundscape and Sonic
Art, 29.10.2016, a
cooperation between
the University of Musicand the Performing Arts(Institute of Music
Aesthetics) and the
Kunsthaus Graz.

It was not just Duchamp but the entire legendary exhibition—which ran in 1968 at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York and explored the machine as part of anartistic way of thinking and creating—that had a lasting impact on him. The curator,
Pontus Hulten, brought together artworks addressing the machine as a promise (aswith the Futurists), as a danger (as with the Surrealists), or as a distinct aesthetic
medium (as with Duchamp). Fontana’s enthusiasm for technical and mechanical development and also for Wittgenstein’s analysis of language underwent a physical translation. In a period of growing electronic and chemical influence on communication andperception of social reality, and the increasing awareness of how nature was changing,
the show also implicitly raised the question of an actual dichotomy between man andmachine, between culture and nature. The concept of the analytical staging of an
everyday encounter between nature and culture runs like a thread through Fontana’s
work to this day. Famous as a result of his work with the Australian Broadcasting
Company, Fontana was awarded a DAAD scholarship in Germany. Within this context
he created compositions and live sound sculptures for the WDR ‘Studio Akustische
Kunst’ (Studio Acoustic Art) in Cologne, including Distant Trains (1983), Metropolis
Köln (1984), Soundbridge Cologne—San Francisco (1987) and was part of the groundbreaking exhibition Für Augen und Ohren (For Eyes and Ears) at the Academy for Fine
Arts in Berlin, curated by René Block who for that event drew up a wonderful construction map of the development of New Music and Sound Art.
‘My work over the years has been an ongoing investigation into the aesthetic
significance of sounds happening at a particular moment in time. This has led me tocreate a series of projects that treat the urban and natural environment as a living
source of musical information.’ 9Sound Island, Fontana’s 1994 installation at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, is anotherwork that analyses both the imaginary worlds of national identity and also the rulesof acoustic visualization and verbal images. Using eight loudspeakers he transmitted
the rushing of the sea off the coast of Normandy onto the façade of the Arc de
Triomphe. Due to the complex acoustics, the white noise of the crashing waves
absorbed and masked all other noises. Emerging from the metro station, people
were surprised by the sound of the roaring surf as they walked past the structurein the middle of the multi-lane traffic island. The coastal area, inscribed in cultural
memory as the scene of heavy losses during the Allied invasion of German-occupied
France, was mixed before the inner eyes of the passers-by with the arch as a visible
symbol of French supremacy. On the observation platform, 16 loudspeakers played
the transmissions of ambient noises from 16 visible locations. Thus what the eye
saw was in line with acoustic reality. You could look as far as the eye could see, andfrom the sounds also imagine the life and goings-on there. Fontana has more recently

René Block, from: Für Augen und Ohren (exhibition catalogue, Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin, 1980)

begun to ‘re’combine images with sound. For instance, the sound of the temple
bells in Silent Echoes, extracted and abstracted by high-frequency microphones andseismic devices—his first audiovisual work, composed for the London gallery Haunchof Veniso­n in 2009—were combined with close-up images of the ringing bell in highimage resolution as a video. As an internal and external phenomenon before the eyesof the viewer, his abstracted works become whole sound-images. For Desert Soundingson the roof of the OK Center in Linz (2014) he juxtaposed high-resolution video images of the moving desert sand of Abu Dhabi with the acoustic recordings of vibration
sensors buried in the sand. Both an acoustic and visual experience at the same time,204 — 205
Katrin Bucher
Autor
Trantow

Technical sketch for the installation of the sound system inSpace01 by Martin Beckthe overlapping waves and lines moved by the wind on the creamy white sand combined with the sounds of constant movement that no one had ever been able to hear
before.
Within the context of the conference Music and Landscape. Soundscape andSonic Art at the Graz University of Music and Performing Arts, the Kunsthaus Graz
commissioned Bill Fontana with a site-specific work for the inner courtyard of the
Kunsthaus building. Since 2017 Acoustical Visions of the River Mur has brought thesounds of the River Mur, which is connected to the Kunsthaus via its extinguishingsystem, into the courtyard. Pipes act as sound amplifiers bringing the burbling andtrickling sounds to the surface for the visitors. It is especially in these recent,aesthetically arranged works that it is as if the beliefs of the gamelan musicians
are once again confirmed. Image and sound describe an energy that flows througheverything and becomes perceptible in a composed overlapping. Fontana extracts
recognizable patterns from the recordings that complement one another in pictureand sound. Using technical devices, he commits himself in this way both to technology and nature and, through the sensory experience of their aesthetic relationship,
manages to show them in fragile coherence.10

The hydroelectric power station
south of the city makes the waterrise. Trees standing in the water ofthe River Mur, December 2019

the power station have stood in the water, allow us to hear both the noises of theflowing water and also the power station’s turbines. The basic sound of the waterflowing and the swinging of the rotor merge into a rhythmic suction in space. The
steam from the geothermal heat sweeps past the visitors as a gentle breath. Yet it isprecisely the factor of the living plant, which experiences this simultaneously withthe transmitted sound and incorporates itself into the existing patterns on site, that
increases the feeling of a real continuum in which time, materiality and spatial levels
are interlaced; relativity can be experienced here.
Just as Fontana identifies details from the acoustic sources, he also edits the films inthe same way: close-ups are juxtaposed with panoramas, views of structural analysis
multiplied, tonalities determined. In the installation, acoustic and visual patterns arealigned on the theme of cycle energy that, alongside an eerie urgency, render tangible
a constantly pulsating existence.

‘When simultaneity makes time spread in dimension, multidimensional soundbecomes more material.’ 11

10This article waspreviously written andprinted as Bill Fontana.
Sound Sculptures in ashorter form for Musicand Landscape/Soundscape and Sonic Art, ed.
Christa Brüstle, Studien
zur Wertungsforschung,
Vienna/London/New
York 2019, pp. 237–245.
The text was expanded
and adapted for thispublication.
11
Bill Fontana in a conversation with the author
on 19.12.2019.

The question as to what energy sounds like is answered in the exhibition Primal
Energies and the public sound project Sonic Projections by drawing attention to aholistic perception of energy and the environment: in the domed space of the
Kunsthaus, Fontana’s Primal Energies immerses us in the acoustic and visual
structures of solar, water, wind and geothermal energy. Eight places in Portugal,
California, England, Italy, Germany and Austria, their sound sources and cinematic
views, are assembled in three-dimensional space on 64 loudspeakers and eightprojection surfaces into a spherical composition of the properties of cycle energy.
For this Fontana uses the latest technology in spatial sound acoustics (Meyer Sound
Galileo GALAXY), so that the composition can develop not only in time but also inspace. Primal Energies explores very current and, for the developers at Meyer Sound,prototypical possibilities of multidimensional soundscapes and uses the influenceof movement on the viewer as well as the level of content as a theme for the multidimensional composition. In addition to the acoustic and visual recordings collectedfrom across the world, there is a transmission site located on the dammed River Mur
in Graz. A tree near the hydropower station is linked to the total composition with live
sounds and images. Connected to a sound meter, the tree transmits its environmental
sound through its beautifully wooden resonance. Its roots, which since the start of‘I only hear the sky when an aeroplane flies over me.’ 12

12
From a conversation
between sound artist
and academic Justin
Winkler and a woman
with a visual impairment—retold within
the context of the
public studio talk I: Wie
klingt die Stadt?, Radio
Helsinki, Graz,
25.01.2020.

Parallel to the exhibition, Sonic Projections examines a perception of the environment
as immediate surroundings. Just as the aeroplane makes the sky noticeable, it isoften disruption that leads to actual perception. The resistance that emerged in 1988
from various circles testifies not least to Fontana’s ability to discern sensitive points
in a society. From today’s perspective, the perceived provocation was based on amisunderstanding triggered by a lack of general information and—as was usual at thetime—little active mediation work. Today, the main focus of Sonic Projections lies lesswith working on the ‘dark stain’ in the city’s history, and more with perceiving the city
as a model of community. The reenactment once again transmits unfamiliar soundsof the world (tropical birds, a windbuoy, Japanese bells, a San Francisco foghorn,etc.) for several minutes into the urban space, a gentle irritation that gives people abrief nudge. An essential factor is that the sounds stand out due to their unfamiliar
localization and so reflect back on the actual place of perception. Today, the revival of
the sound sculpture encounters a changed city, which is a delicate balance of use andoveruse, democratic communication and economic marketing, of working, living and206 — 207
Katrin Bucher
Autor
Trantow

protected space, and a city which, in its densification, increased traffic and growthin consumption, faces completely different demands to those of 32 years ago.
Apart from technical development and usage for broadcasts of city sounds via theInternet, the Schlossberg is today a nature conservation zone intended to offer people somewhere to relax. It must be said that this is not easy, since there is alsoa concert stage located in the middle of the hill. The effect that this had on the
installation was that Fontana has selected only ‘clearly’ unprovocative sounds andwill transmit them alternately from the Schloßberg and the Kunsthaus in dialogue.
The issue of education and inclusion is, in today’s information society, more important
than ever; the project will therefore be widely explained both in the press and also on
social media. We as a museum will be offering an extensive educational programme
for the duration of the project. Part of this programme focuses on the sensory perceptions of people with visual and hearing impairments and their perception of the city.
In addition to expanding the project and mediation support, this flows directly as aprototype into city guidelines for inclusive mediation projects. Beyond this, long
discussions with the city offices have led to us agreeing on an adaptable project
scenario that outlines a possible reduction in volume or frequency of projections.
Against the backdrop of global warming, the world’s tropical sounds represent an
impetus for dialogue; about how we live with one another, and how we want to shape
our future. A whole generation is setting out to ask for alternatives that bring an
instability of interplay back into harmonious unison. Concerning the issue of environmental protection, the focus is on restricting overexploitation and on the returnof extracted energy. It is not only on an atomic basis that everything is permeatedwith energy and strives for balance: as a whole, the world is defined by the physicallaws of a constant exchange of energy. In order to address the living conditions of aconstantly growing world population and its consumption, we need not just technological innovations and developments in energy and food production and use, but also
political and economic decisions supported by each individual person. For this, in turn,
we all need the greatest possible presence and attention.
When I recently asked Bill Fontana what has driven him to keep tracking the sounds
around us across the world for 50 years now, using constantly changing new technology, his poetic reply was: ‘to become fully present’. What he was implying was that
his work to date serves to make us become fully present—that is, to live in the here
and now, to take in the present, to behave and act accordingly.13

13
In a conversation
with the author on
20.11.2019.