BUNKER
temporary 2 channel multi-room audio installation, 2010
Listen to a 10min excerpt from this project

BUNKER is a sound work that engages four distinct concrete rooms at Fort Rodd Hill, a Canadian coastal artillery fort built in the late 1890s. By nature of their design and material, these rooms are a highly specialized architecture, insulated from the outdoors and produce very little inherent ambient noise. This creates four unique environments where the slightest breeze, or reverberation through the concrete, becomes an amplified and distinct acoustic experience.

To engage the specificity of the place, each room was treated with the same process: the ambience of each room was recorded over a fifteen minute duration, the recording begins in silence, and then pre-recorded sounds of electrical-based noise pollution (eg: cellular networks, domestic transformers, radio waves) were introduced into the rooms using portable speakers. These noises slowly increase in volume over the recorded period, saturating the rooms and creating an acoustic 'cast' of the spaces. At certain points, the listener is able to architecturally conceptualize the spaces through the phenomena of reflection and reverberation until, eventually, the noise level blurs all definition of place or material, and dimensional space flattens out into a wall of tone. The experience abruptly ends at fifteen minutes, with a dramatic reverberating tail, as the introduced noise stops and attention returns to the sound of the empty space.

BUNKER introduces the residue of electrical power and mass communication into tomb-like environments where one normally experiences a detached sensation of isolation within an acoustic vacuum. It allows these artificial, and otherwise unwanted sounds, to define these spaces, re-shape, and ultimately dissolve them. The work addresses both architecture as an aural experience as well as narratives of isolation and technologies of communication that are woven into our lives.

My thanks to Fort Rodd Hill for their cooporation in producing this work.

BUNKER is available as an editioned CD from INFREQUENCY EDITIONS