What the train left behind is a sound installation in Winona, MN, that reproduces the infrasound of the trains crossing the city. The rail tracks characterize the urban landscape of this town as a legacy of its industrial past. The installation displayed the frequencies of both Amtrak and freight trains. This project is part of the urbaninfrasound.com platform.

Urbaninfrasound.com is a website focused on the presence of infrasound in public spaces.

An open experiment where the audience experiences a musical piece just by touching a baby grand piano. The instrument vibrates reproducing the very low frequencies of a performance recorded on the same site.

This place is too noisy is the final piece created as part of my MFA degree at RISD. There is no limit to the amount of people visiting the installation beyond the reduced dimensions of the space. The visitors go across a dark corridor with a small gate at the end, on the right side of the wall. That entrance connects the corridor with a room shaped like a cone. There is no light inside that space except a small point of light filtered from the ceiling on the opposite side of the structure. Walls, floor and ceiling guide the visitors to that extreme end of the room. The cone ends in a small cubicle, a small room for a single person. Once the visitor is inside that cage they feel a subtle vibration through their bodies.

This piece is the most architectural of all my works. The space is determinant to build the liminality of the work. In this case, the ritual consists in crossing the corridor and getting into the cone. This installation is built from the idea of the dichotomy between light and darkness. From the light outside the room, the visitor walks to the darkness at the end of the corridor, the darkest point of the installation. Then, he or she walks again to the light of the small cubicle at the end of the room. Another element that builds the liminal effect of the piece is the distribution of the spaces inside the room. The long corridor is a threshold to gain access to the conic chamber where the walls are more and more close in every step we take. All the architectural elements point to the small chamber at the end of the cone.

In visual terms, the illuminated small cubicle works as a point of light at the end of the tunnel, a place of discovery or realization. This recalls the work of James Turrell. The internal structure of the room also refers to a speaker’s construction. Here is where the sound element of the piece, the core part of the project, starts its work. Inside the chamber, the visitor experiences a very subtle vibration. This vibration pressures the visitor’s head and makes his or her body vibrates from the feet to the top of the head. This sensation is generated by the low frequencies and infrasound of the Convention Center.

The main exhibition building in Providence has a permanent sound generated by its AC. In addition to that, during the Graduate Exhibition, that noise is mixed with the sound of every piece and the conversations of the visitors, who number 3,000 during the opening.

Being such a crowded show, making the experience as individual as possible is central. The corridor is three feet wide, so two people can walk in together. However, the cone gradually reduces the social space of the visitor, forcing him or her to go inside the chamber completely alone. This is where the dialog starts.

Images: Detail I, Detail II, Physical Sensation, Plan of the Installation.

Research in paper about the subjectivity of our vision system.

Fuck, I’m fired, unlike the rest of my installations, is located in an artistic environment, in the Sol Koffler Gallery. The piece is a vibrating couch that moves in a very low range of infrasounds between 10 and 12 hertz. It should be experienced individually. The movement is almost imperceptible during the first moments; only spending some time sitting we notice its effect. The title is located on the wall, next to the couch; however, it is not the entry point to the experience like in my others pieces.

The visitor finds a couch in the middle of the gallery. The invitation to sit down is clear; it’s comfortable. He is expecting that something happens but apparently that’s just a simple couch. He reads the title; he infers that it is an art piece. He waits, nothing happens. He starts thinking that some part of the mechanism is not working correctly.

Suddenly he starts to feel something almost imperceptible, a very subtle vibration. He is not sure if it comes from the couch or from his body; it’s like ants over his skin. He decides to give some time to the piece.

The more time he spends paying attention to his body the ants become bigger and bigger insects. The tingling sensation increases its presence throughout all over his body. He feels his body buzzing. At some point, he cannot stop paying attention to what is going on under his skin.

Suddenly, without any kind of change in the vibration, his stomach suffers a pinch. The visitor doesn’t know why, but his belly is like the natural way out for the vibration. He can feel his stomach straining. It’s time to go; now he can imagine how people feel when they are fired.

The novelty of this piece resides in the fact that this is the first incursion into an artistic place, out of a specific space. In absence of an environment that reinforces the idea, the couch has to do all the work in order to transmit the sensation.

This piece works in two different steps. All the people get the subtle vibration; some people spend some minutes sitting before they start to realize that something is vibrating on their back. More than vibration we can define this movement of the couch as a slight shivering. This idea tries to transmit the subtlety of our body sensations.
If one spends at least 10 minutes sitting on the couch, he or she can feel the tension in his or her stomach. People who spend less time on the couch, experience a very low frequency, and they are forced to engage in a deep relationship with their bodies.

The sound is the central element of the piece. The noise is a 15 minute long track that goes from 10 to 12 hertz. It’s crucial in this piece the shape of the wave. In this case they are triangles instead of sinusoidal curves, with these changes they affect in a more direct way the visitor’s body, specifically the stomach.

Images: Plan of the Installation, Detail I, Physical Sensation.