The Sound of Reformed Space: Liz Phillips's Responsive Installations

Abstract

Abrass ring spins on its edge madly accelerating as it descends to a final stop. A table of water shimmers vibrating as the air moves above it. Fish swim within a large tank following invisible currents. Wind rushes over an empty lot filling it with eerie sounds. A mound of spaghetti invites the hungry to lift forkfuls and eat. Each of these scenes provides the dynamic ground for some of the many sound installations Liz Phillips has constructed during the past thirty years. Each furnishes the sound that will be synthesized to track the motion and position of those who enter into the fields that surround them. Animate and inanimate objects fill spaces everywhere on our planet; they are a visible audible presence open to tactile response. Phillips’s work adds a further dimension, bringing the negative space surrounding these sites into dynamic interconnection with the solid presence of ring, table, fishtank, and so forth. As space becomes an audible environment mapping presence and absence, motion and stillness, emptiness and fullness, her work calls into question the basic philosophical divisions between subject and object, between space and time. Phillips’s audience, if that’s the right word, cannot simply look at or listen to her work; people’s tangible engagement with it—their bodies, perhaps utterly unaware—makes the work.