BILL FONTANA – ACOUSTICAL VISIONS
ART SCI DMA LECTURE SERIES
April 5, 2018, 12:00 pm

A presentation about Fontana’s recent work that explores the image that a sound makes and the sounds that an image makes.

Bill began his career as a composer. What really began to interest him was not so much the music that he could write but the states of mind he would experience when he felt musical enough to compose. In those moments, when he became musical, all the sounds around me also became musical.

Bill hase worked for the past 45 years creating installations that use sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural settings. These have been installed in public spaces and museums around the world including San Francisco, New York, Rome, Paris, London, Chicago, Vienna, Berlin, Venice, Sydney ,Tokyo, Barcelona, Linz, Manchester, Istanbul and Abu Dhabi.

Bill’s sound sculptures use the human and/or natural environment as a living source of musical information. He assumes that at any given moment there will be something meaningful to hear and that music, in the sense of coherent sound patterns, is a process that is going on constantly. His methodology has been to create networks of simultaneous listening points that relay real time acoustic data to a common listening zone (sculpture site). Since 1976 Bill has called these works sound sculptures.