Joe Diebes: CHRONOLOGY
It may be one of the more remarkable performances you'll ever encounter of Bach's Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, but performer Joe Diebes isn't making a sound. In a series of videos, we watch the artist's hand, holding a pen, attempt to trace (on translucent vellum) the notes from the pages of the score as they're played from a recording. Capturing little more than gestural approximations, Diebes produces a series of hieroglyphic loops and squiggles that delightfully appear, in the end, like some of Henri Michaux's mystical pseudowriting, suggesting a similar, trance-like engagement.
Elsewhere, the visual expression of music, which Diebes has investigated before in several beguiling installations, becomes manic. In a piece titled anachronism 1, he wrote and then erased passages of the St. Matthew Passion onto the same manuscript page until the paper began to disintegrate. In anachronism 2, he copied Beethoven's last string quartet in its entirety onto the same set of staves, making a dense, jittery, and unreadable score.
Then there's the hallucinatory video Scherzo. Clips of a cellist bowing short and impossibly fast passages Diebes wrote himself were fed into an algorithm that produces an infinitely cycling piece that never quite repeats itself. Featuring MTV-like jumps and pounding, relentless rhythms, the work is bravura performance of frenzied ecstasy. Diebes is a virtuoso of the virtual.
Paul Rodgers/9W, 529 W 20th, 212-414-9810. Through December 18.
reviewed by Bill Van Siclen The Providence Journal | ART SCENE | September, 2005
A sound impression: It's not just what you see, but what you hear, in Brown's 'Song of Transformation' exhibit
Anyone who's felt the rumble of distant thunder or the sonic boom from a passing jet knows that sound can have a spatial, as well as a purely aural, dimension. In "Song of Transformation," a striking new multimedia installation at Brown University, New York artist and composer Joe Diebes explores a quieter, though no less potent, side of the space-sound continuum. Aviary, the first of two sound-based works on display at Brown's David Winton Bell Gallery, consists of seven white birdcages suspended from the ceiling of a brightly lit white room. There are no birds in the cages -- or anywhere else, for that matter -- but thanks to a special sound system, the room is filled with the chirps and twitters of electronically simulated bird calls.
The resulting clash of aural and visual signals presents visitors with a kind of sensory conundrum. Visually, Aviary is as starkly minimal as a prison cell (albeit a very bright prison cell). Close your eyes though, and it sounds as boisterous as a tropical rainforest canopy.
The show's second piece, Sound Field is equally mysterious.
Where Aviary is bright enough to require a pair of sunglasses, Sound Field is shrouded in darkness. Scattered around the room -- and spotlighted like gems in a jewelry-store window -- are about a dozen sunflower-shaped sculptures, each of which is equipped with a tiny speaker.
As you slowly make your way through the "field," these speakers emit a Morse Code-like chorus of random blips and beeps interpsersed with bursts of white noise. Once again, the result is strangely weird and wonderful -- like taking an afternoon stroll through an alien greenhouse.
What (if anything) is Diebes trying to tell us with these pieces?
In an interview with gallery director Jo-Ann Conklin, parts of which are reprinted in the show's pamplet-size catalog, Diebes says his goal is "finding ways that music and sound can suggest the unseen dimensions of physical objects and alter our perceptions of them."
Certainly that's true of Aviary.
Even though we can't see them, each digitally created chirp, trill and twitter seems to confirm the presence of a flock of very talkative birds. In the end, we're not quite sure whether to trust our ears or our eyes.
(Sound Field, by contrast, seems more conventional. Though the combination of aural and visual elements is still wonderfully effective, it doesn't pack Aviary's sensory altering punch.)
Both works also blur traditional dividing lines between nature and technology. In Aviary, for example, the various bird noises sound relatively realistic at first, but grow increasingly unnatural and electronic-sounding the longer you listen. The sounds that emanate from Sound Field, meanwhile, were created using a variety of electronic sine tones and white noise.
Diebes, who studied with minimalist music guru La Monte Young, also uses special computer programs to continually remix and reshape his sonic landscapes. As a result, the bird sounds in Aviary and the sonic buzz and chatter of Sound Field never repeat themselves.
If all this sounds way too geeky for it's own good, trust me: It's not. Indeed, if any of the new wave of computer and electronics based art forms are ever going to break out of the digital ghetto and attract more mainstream audiences, works such as Aviary and Sound Field will most likely lead the way.
"Song of Transformation" runs through Oct. 30 at the David Winton Bell Gallery, List Art Center, 64 College St., Providence.
Hours: Mon-Fri 11-4 and Sat.-Sun. 1-4.
Phone: (401) 863-2932.
reviewed by Doug Norris | Art New England | December/January 2006
Review: SONG OF TRANSFORMATION, A SOUND INSTALLATION BY JOE DIEBES
David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University / Providence, RI
Joe Diebes, an artist and composer, creates intricately built environments that are both visually arresting and aurally fluid, requiring the visitor to engage both sense in unfamiliar ways. Two rooms accessed by a series of hinged doors set into a gallery-long temporary wall greet the visitor to the Bell Gallery. The rooms play off one another, conveying a sense of harmonic duality -- nature and technology, white and black, daydream and nightmare. But there is more complexity to these parings created by Joe Diebes.
The first room, called Aviary, is filled with white light. Seven empty birdcages are suspended from the ceiling. Digitally manipulated birdcalls and birdsong emanate from the cages in a constantly changing avian dialogue.
The next hinged door leads to a small corridor, a kind of limbo between entranceways; the second room, Sound Field, opens to darkness. It features sixteen black silk sunflowers, their seedpods ontaining speakers, growing from a field of black Astroturn. Highly focused beams of light provide the only source of illumination, exposing the faces of the sunflowers in an eerie glow, while sine tones and white noise fill the room. To this visitor, there is a disturbing, even malevolent feeling in the shape and texture of the installation and its ambient sound. Primary noises include high metallic trill and a static shuffling that sounds like a cross between a slithering snake and a needle that has slipped out of the groove of a phonograph.
The birdcages in Aviary, while esthetically pleasing, depict a trapped environment--manmade cages to hold birds and their songs for human enjoyment. Meanwhile, two benches are provided in Sound Field, sugesting that what some may find ominous and foreboding, others may welcome as meditative.
Here, sculpture sings and rooms emerge from the subconscious as tactile, three-dimensional archetypes, the embodiment of dreams.
reviewed by Stewart Dearing | Brown Daily Herald | Arts and Culture Section | September 12, 2005
Diebes' 'Transformation' creates two distinct worlds
One artist's soundtrack to life has arrived at the Bell Gallery in List Art Center.
The gallery's new show, "Song of Transformation," displays two sculptural sound installations by composer and artist Joe Diebes that unify visual and sonic elements to create sculpture with a soundtrack.
Diebes described these two works as an experiment testing the abilities of modern technology. "I wanted to see how far I could go to emulate nature with these tools," he said.
The first installation, "Aviary," consists of seven white birdcages suspended from the ceiling of a shockingly white room. Speakers hidden in each cage play a series of digitally manipulated birdcalls. The sounds are randomized through a computer algorithm.
The second, "Sound Field," presents 15 sunflowers on a lawn of black Astroturf. Highly focused spotlights illuminate the flowers in an otherwise entirely dark room with black walls. A mixture of white noises and manipulated Morse code sounds, also randomized through a computer algorithm, play from speakers in the center of each sunflower.
While these works were conceived as companion pieces, this is the first time they are being shown together, said Bell Gallery director Jo-Ann Conkin.
A graduate of Yale, Diebes has studied classical music with pioneering artist and composer La Monte Young, as well as at the Julliard School. But more recently he has been moving away from music in the classic sense and toward the art sphere with his works.
In a lecture at the opening of the show last Friday, Diebes explained that he is interested in the way that music shapes space in a subliminal way. "I'm interested in finding ways that music and sound can suggest the unseen dimensions of physical objects and alter our perceptions of them," he said.
He described a disconnect between the composer and his audience in the way that music is conventionally performed. "Where things get complicated is the act of composing a piece of music, spending a month writing a 10-minute piece. There's a real disconnect between me and the audience and it's hard to see where its emotions are going to go during the performance," he said.
To eliminate the barrier between listener and composer, Diebes decided to move his work from the concert hall, a more controlled environment, to the art gallery, where the viewer has more freedom to direct his experience. "The gallery sets up a completely different mode of reception than the concert hall by operating on the viewer/listener's time frame rather than the composer's," he wrote.
In using a gallery space, Diebes believes that he is exploring a different way to understand music. "I'm a big believer in background music because I'm fundamentally distracted when I listen to music. I listen to it as texture," he said.
In "Song of Transformation," Diebes' combinations of sounds provide a texture within which the viewer can understand the visual elements of the piece more clearly. "I'm not offering a specific viewpoint to be decoded, but I'm setting up a situation where you can think about these things," he said.
Diebes succeeds in setting up a separate "situation" for his audience to consider his sound installations. Both rooms are completely enclosed and leave the viewer feeling isolated and lonely, almost like an intruder in a surreal private world. In "Sound Field," the combination of lighting and sound effects is unsettling.
Despite their occasionally disturbing nature, Diebes' installations provide a unique view of installation art and a calming place to get away from the bustle of college life for a few minutes.
"Song of Transformation" will be on view at the List Art Center through October 30.
reviewed by Andrew Maerkle | Flavorpill | February 15, 2005
Joe Diebes: premonitions
With premonitions, Joe Diebes has created an absorbing, sensually provocative installation, combining cinematic suspense and technical sophistication. His sound sculptures toy with the gallery space and perceived notions about conceptual art as sotto voce — a black canvas emanating white noise and ethereal whispers — attests, while String Quartet No. 2 is a mysteriously private environment for compositional experimentation. Elsewhere, the exhibition's centerpiece, Aviary, brings an abstract aesthetic of negative space into a state of meaningful, exciting tension with lived experience; consisting of a room full of empty birdcages emitting digitally altered birdcalls, it throws the viewer/listener into an artificially tamed but unpredictable and haunting wilderness. Ultimately communicative, these works explore individuality through a rare dynamic and creative energy.