Title: Spiraling Echoes: A Sound Sculpture for the Rotunda of San Francisco City Hall
Dates: February 13 - May 8, 2009
Location: San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery (City Hall Rotunda), SF, CA
Artist: Bill Fontana
The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery is pleased to announce an expansion of the Art at City Hall program, with a new exhibition project featuring internationally renowned artists commissioned to create site-specific installations that interact with the architecture of San Francisco’s historic City Hall. Spiraling Echoes, by San Francisco-based sound artist Bill Fontana reflects the San Francisco Arts Commission’s commitment to presenting visual arts projects that highlight our regional diversity and position Bay Area visual art production within an international contemporary art landscape. By commissioning new works such as Spiraling Echoes, the SFAC Gallery provides new and challenging opportunities for contemporary art to engage with a civic dialogue, while making art accessible to a broad audience.
Fontana’s sound installation, Spiraling Echoes, will employ an acoustic phenomenon common to bats, dolphins and whales known as echolocation, in which high-frequency sounds produce an acute directional beam of ultrasound. Eight transducers will be mounted in City Hall high above the floor around the circular colonnade within the Rotunda’s dome. These transducers will send out ultrasonic beams that function as carrier waves for this project’s original soundtrack. The soundtrack, which will include a range of sounds from music to spoken word to wildlife, will bring the sounds of San Francisco past and present into the building. When the transducers are moving, the sound beams will travel downward in space, playing off of and moving through the various surfaces of the Rotunda.
Spiraling Echoes will translate the visual experience of the architecture in the Rotunda (the focal point in the building with its marble staircase and ornate carvings) into sound. As people move through City Hall’s rotunda they will hear contemporary and historic sounds from various San Francisco events and locations. The sounds will not follow the individual, but rather a person will move through different sound points. The sounds will be experienced most notably on the fourth floor corridors overlooking the Rotunda, and spiraling echoes will float down into the space becoming gradually softer, and finally heard at the volume of a whisper on the first level. Encountering sounds from another place and/or time will provoke a sense that the City’s character, its history and vibrancy have been captured within the walls of our treasured City Hall.
About Bill Fontana
Bill Fontana is a world-renowned pioneer of sound art who has created monumental, site-specific, aural experiential installations around the globe. For the past 30 years, Fontana has used sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural spaces. Many of his sound sculptures—installed on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, London’s Millennium Bridge and Big Ben, stations along the Lyon light rail system, and the Brooklyn Bridge—are a marriage of public space and contemporary art. Fontana has gained international prominence, exhibiting at such venerable institutions as the Tate Modern, the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Museum of American Art. It has been 20 years since Fontana, a San Francisco resident for three decades, completed his last major commission here.
