Color of sound

Atlanta artist Sara Hornbacher’s newest work, “A Thousand Plateaus,” is a vivid experience. Inside her environment at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, ideas become more than three-dimensional. Words emit colors. Shapes make noise. Real time is speeded up, slowed down and processed to synthesize a dynamic, disorienting landscape. “Plateaus” is a multi-layered physiological sensation.
Digitally altered sound accompanies the trio of 16-by-22-foot DVD image projections that animate the cavernous dark space that was once a gallery. Along the wall, a rolling panorama shifts into an undulating pattern; a wave of blue and green unfurls across the entire virtual picture plane. Mesmerizing, sometimes synchronic, views of clear rivers and verdant forests are interrupted by moving pictures of a frantic Midtown Atlanta construction site. A transmuted INTEL TV commercial featuring the Blue Man Group gives way to vintage film of robotic hands, then human hands, playing at building blocks. White digits are set against a deep blue backdrop while binary equations scroll by. Rockets arch through the sky in a gray-scale universe. Retro gives way to modern, then loops back.
A multi-channeled sonic track devised by Andrew Deutsch works like an abstract mnemonic device. Sounds involve broken bells and music boxes, an analog synthesizer, a digitized live violin performance, explosions and other audio that reflect what the composer calls “the sound of prime information.”
The bitmapped aural encounter is all about communication systems, explains Deutsch, who teaches at the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University in New York. “You recognize these sounds,” he says, “but they have no content. John Cage called it ‘empty words.’ Words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ — they don’t mean anything on their own, but they connect other important elements of the message.”
The immersive atmosphere that Hornbacher created with Deutsch in “A Thousand Plateaus” draws from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri. The French philosophers’ book by the same title is divided into plateaus instead of chapters. Like their complex, multi-leveled writing, Hornbacher’s media is a network of ideas about philosophy, psychology, science fiction, society, music and art.
Space, time and material relationships have long been pivotal in Hornbacher’s work. In the 1997 “Transfigured Time” at City Gallery at Chastain, Hornbacher wove a triptych of wall-sized video portraits into a vital social landscape. “Altered States” at Fay Gold Gallery two years ago centered on transforming realities for man, nature and the machine.
What’s new in “Plateaus” is the artist’s desire to merge the viewer with her vision. Hornbacher designed the Contemporary space with ultra-sonic sensors that should enable the viewer to activate elements of the media experience. Placed on beams close to the gallery’s high ceiling, the sensors are meant to be activated by the viewer’s movement through the space.
It was impossible to perceive the effects of that high-tech gizmology on opening night. Even early on, when only a few people were inside the space, only someone familiar with “Plateaus’” visual and audio sequences would have registered any measure of interactivity. Later in the evening, sensors must have been totally baffled by the number of signals/bodies. No matter. The hypnotic infusion shifted enough on its own to transfix viewers and compel a number of them to sit down on the floor to better assimilate the unfolding projections.
“This is an experimental opportunity,” says Hornbacher. “I see the installation as a laboratory. I may want to alter the sensors throughout the show. Interactivity is something that you need to test.” Whether or not the artist modifies those sensing mechanisms, each viewer who enters “A Thousand Plateaus” will experience the best media art Atlanta has yet seen. In her environmental approach to imagemaking, Hornbacher has reached a new high plateau of her own.
Sara Hornbacher’s “A Thousand Plateaus” continues through March 10 at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 535 Means St. 404-688-1970. A panel discussion titled “Machinic Visions: John Johnston, Sara Hornbacher & Andrew Deutsch” will be held Feb. 22 at 7 p.m.