Five repurposed vintage radios with a diorama embody sound through touch.
The audio sources are reflective of the Far Out Gallery location and include the ocean, birds, foghorns, and Muni tracks. These sounds are translated to vibrations by means of transducers installed in the radios. Olivia Ting grew up in this neighborhood. It’s where she became an artist and discovered sound as her medium despite being deaf.
Anne Marguerite, Olivia, and friend
photo by John Sanborn
Olivia and Lloyd May in background
photo by Anne Marguerite Herbst
a guest feeling sound photo by John Sanbornn
I was inspired by the story of Helen Keller experiencing the broadcast of a Beethoven symphony performed by the New York Philharmonic with her hands on the radio; it was as if she held the music as a morphing sculpture that spoke to her through touch. As a deaf artist, I am intrigued by sound as energy— the physical repercussions of molecular vibrations and their harmonious metamorphoses. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be transformed from one form to another. For me, what came through the radio for Keller was the creative energy of Beethoven, who himself lost his hearing as an adult, making a powerful haptic connection across time and space.
The five haptic radios I built for this series are meant to be touched. The audio sources I chose are reflective of the Far Out Gallery location – the ocean, birds, foghorns, and Muni tracks — and are translated to vibration by means of transducers installed in the radios. The neighborhood is also quite personal to me: growing up here, this is where I became an artist and discovered sound as my medium despite being deaf.
These haptic experiences are interwoven with excerpts of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, which was, in ways, his lyrical aural portraiture of the countryside where he escaped from the cacophony of city life as his hearing was deteriorating.
This project seeks to paint a cheeky, vibratory, phonic and visual tapestry of the ways how sound infiltrates our senses, memories, and bodies.
-Olivia