Sonic Boom
Sound isn't just noise or music - it's the raw material for a growing number of audio artists, and montreal is building a strong international reputation for this form of creative expression
CAMERON SKENE, Freelance
Published: Saturday, January 13 2007

This is the latest instalment in the continuing series In Profile, which looks at a cross-section of art being produced on the island and the people who make it.

Diversity is a prominent feature of Montreal's current art scene. Previously dominated by the strong tradition of Quebec's modernist painters, the realm of artmaking has expanded beyond what is coyly called "the dirty arts" (painting, drawing and sculpture) to include photo and mixed-media, web-based installation, performance, sound, even smell.

This fourth edition of the In Profile series, Sonic Boom, examines four artists who are working in what could be called a booming field in the art world: sound, also called audio art or sound installation. To some it is just noise, albeit with banks of computers, high-tech speakers and jumbles of tangled wires, and playing to esoteric-looking crowds at performances in barns or obscure festivals.
Jean-Pierre Aube: "For some artists working with technology, the more shiny it is, the more it looks professional. When we look at Star Trek, everything looks so smooth: it's like a bourgeois living room."View Larger Image View Larger Image
Jean-Pierre Aube: "For some artists working with technology, the more shiny it is, the more it looks professional. When we look at Star Trek, everything looks so smooth: it's like a bourgeois living room."
JOHN KENNEY, THE GAZETTE
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But sound work, unlike video or web-based work, draws on a long history dating from the early 20th century. Artists in movements like Dada and the Italian Futurists - one of whom, Luigi Russolo, wrote the seminal 1913 sound manifesto, The Art of Noises - made the observation that the sound landscape of the modern age is entirely new, marked with a technological urbanism: the clangs, yelps, squeals and groans of machines. The first noise performances by early sound artists were received in confused silence - one dissatisfied Futurist compared it to "showing the first steam engine to a herd of cows."

continued from e1

But technologies - and the public - seem to have caught up to the concept. Desktop studios and trips to Radio Shack have increased the access to recording and editing. And as everyone knows, anything an artist can get his hands on is fair game. Montreal, in particular, has a strong reputation internationally. With yearly festivals like Mutek and Elektra, support from and access to such art centres as Quartier Ephemere, and ambitious installations like the Silophone, a disused grain silo in the Old Port that in 2000 was turned into a kind of musical instrument, sound in the city is booming.

With the visual getting most of the aesthetic coin in museums and galleries, it is easy to forget the other senses - or dismiss them as devoid of content serious enough for aesthetic investigation. Yet artists are increasingly exploring sound, smell and taste as vehicles for content.

During a stint as a bicycle courier in this city, I ran the usual range of adjustments to the haste, pace and danger of a job that is carried out in a panicky sensory jumble. One adjustment was particularly telling: since you can't swivel your head all the time to look out for traffic, you put your head down, stare fixedly ahead and listen hard. Your eyes are for steering, but your ears are for navigation, and they become the predominant tool for self-preservation.

"We use (sound) like a radar - we think we know where we are with the space in front of our eyes, but if you ever have an ear problem, it's amazing ... blind people walk with a stick, tapping it. It's not to feel out things, it's setting up echoes."Steve Heimbecker is a thickset, methodical man in his 40s. He stares - as most sound artists necessarily do during interviews - into a computer screen, going through DVDs of his work. Heimbecker explores, among other things, the sculptural dimensions of sound. His work with what he calls "acoustic mapping" situates the observer in a multi-channel sound environment.

In The Acoustic Line as the Crow Listens, the artist plotted a mile through the landscape and recorded simultaneously at eight sites placed about 200 metres equidistant. For the resulting installation, speakers are placed together in a line that compresses the mile into 64 feet. The result is a time-warped stereo experience: environmental sounds that travel a mile, like a car horn, move and fade rapidly in a squished sonic environment, bending perception.

"So conceptually, if you walk really fast, you would be travelling faster than the speed of sound," the artist says.
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He fabricates most of his installations himself; his studio is a jumble of speaker boxes built to spec for his next show. His work travels widely to sound festivals and galleries in Europe and North America.

A Saskatchewan native recently transplanted to Montreal, Heimbecker is most known for his sound work with the Silophone and a 2003 installation titled Wind Array Cascade Machine, where a field of 64 wheat-like stalks of electronic sensors bent with the wind on the roof of the

Ex-Centris building on St. Laurent Blvd. The data stream from the rooftop sensors was transmitted to galleries in Toronto and Europe, where other installations, called Pods, translated the data into rows of upright LED readouts on poles, reinterpreting the wind as a field of oscillating lights in the gallery.

"I realized that the wave patterns of a wheat field caused by the wind were exactly how the sine wave works ... so it's a metaphorically perfect thing."

If music is, as American composer John Cage said, "organized sound," then Heimbecker displays how sound, transcribed by technology, can be made into an aesthetic replication of experience: not music, but something altogether new. Heimbecker's eyes light up at the elegant idea: "So the wind in Quebec was blowing in Toronto ..."

"I don't really work with data like Steve does. Steve is really more into programming, how data inputs and then outputs differently. It's totally another way of working ..."

Jean-Pierre Gauthier, preparing for his exhibition at the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal in February, is distracted and intense, with a furrowed brow, constantly looking elsewhere. A maker of sound-producing kinetic installations, Gauthier starts up a piece that's waiting to be shipped from his east-end studio: a piano with wires running from the keys to a swarm of more wires, switches and sensors stuffed into the seat.

The piece is activated by motion sensors. As the viewer moves, the piano twitches into action, plucked notes sputter here and there, initially startling me into thinking that I had stepped on something accidentally
'There are three microprocessors. I program the sequence. (The computer) chooses randomly the note ... Each sequence is tripped by motion sensors."

The effect is unsettling and twitchy at first. As you move, the volume of notes gains mass, cascading into a nervous symphony.

"I like it to be random, so at one point I lose control of the result. ... The composition gets free, like this one - I select the notes ... but the rest is out of my control. To me, the 'order' of this is about trying to get the work free from my control."
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Gauthier, represented by the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, was the 2004 winner of the Sobey Art Award, a $50,000 award given to Canadian artists under 40. Gauthier's noisy, kinetic installations have received lots of notice and justifiable acclaim.

Usually working with everyday objects like skis, mirrors or hammers, Gauthier fashions these into robotic instruments that sing: "Basically the objects are quite insignificant, they're quite normal - but the sound they can make is quite amazing," he says. "(They're) just amplified, no (added) effect. I use as much as possible the pure sound of the object, and (try) to find an object that has its own colour."

In his 2002 installation Echotriste, Gauthier combined mirrors with dangling industrial coils that scored the mirrors' surfaces to create ethereal sounds suggesting an eerie human chorus - home-made music that gives a nod to the Futurists themselves, who encouraged artists to create their own instruments.

"I loved electronics when I was a kid - I had a Radio Shack electronic kit. The work brought me to this. It was quite natural for me to do this."

"Jean-Pierre (Gauthier) and (I) have the same background - we both did our master's at UQAM - a real visual art background. When I think about Pierre, he's a craftsman: He builds stuff."

Jean-Pierre Aube started as a photographer, but instead of visual images now captures sound. "There's not a big difference. ... I go around in the woods with my VLF receiver and bring something back with a technology device - the camera is a radio receiver for me (now)."

Aube is a tall, gregarious man who works out of his home in the north end. The interview is occasionally accented by the staccato wails of his new baby in the other room. Leaning back on a thrift-store couch, we watch a video projection of a performance piece he did at the Quartier Ephemere this past summer. A huge mass of giant speakers sits in the middle of a room. Titled Save the Waves, the system - built out of plywood, old computers and scrap material - showed that he is not averse to building stuff, either.

"A critic wrote that the exhibition isn't really about the object, it was more about the sound - which surprised me a little bit because those speakers weighed 3,000 pounds ..."

Aube often works with a VLF (very low frequency) receiver that he makes himself:
"It's basically (like) a hula hoop with 300 feet of cable, ... a simple radio receiver that allows you to grab all natural electromagnetic phenomena."

Very low frequency was inadvertently discovered in the 1800s when it became apparent that telegraph lines picked up signals from atmospheric phenomena like the aurora borealis. VLF receivers also pick up what Aube considers to be the frequency of modernity: "60 hertz is the soundtrack of domestic life, because 60 hertz is everywhere. Your fridge hums at 60 hertz."

Save the Waves is a reflection on Aube's difficulty with getting far enough away from the interference of 60hz electrical lines to record the aurora himself. In the piece, a series of receivers pick up all electromagnetic signals in and around the building, while a performer runs a hand-held receiver over various appliances: a fluorescent light, a sound board, the computers themselves. The effect is an eerie accidental modulation coming from the giant speakers, like a mass of chanting Buddhist monks, all produced by our own electromagnetic pollution.
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Aube, a darling of the electronic festival circuit, has shown his work in such far-flung places as Latvia, France, the Philippines and Germany. Sound art, like a lot of technology-based work, seems to have more of a receptive audience outside North America:

"Let me put it this way: (on this continent) I've never shown my work outside of Quebec, but I've shown 20 times in Europe in the past few years." He adds: "Montreal has a big scene. ... Mutek - it's huge and known all around the world."

"Sound is big nowadays."

Christof Migone agrees. But while the audience is growing for such work, he, like a lot of others, finds that more traditional museums and galleries are taking time to adjust to the medium: "Some galleries are starting (to show more sound work) ... but it's also not an ideal space ... they've done shows, but the result is a cacophony - they just don't take into account that it's a radically different medium."

Migone - tall, slight, and reticent - sits at the kitchen table in his modest Little Italy apartment. He displays a more multidisciplinary bent in his work, but sound is his base: After starting in radio at CKUT in the 1990s with his show Danger in Paradise, he pushed the envelope of experimentation with recording and broadcasting, and has written extensively on the subject of audio art.

"I think sound is something I keep returning to, I guess because I have a certain level of skill. Once I get an idea it often translates into sound, because I guess I can sort of see how it can materialize."

In his work Crackers, Migone solicited volunteer performers through radio and print ads, seeking individuals who were willing to make cracking sounds with various parts of their bodies. Some were more than willing, cracking necks, wrists, toes and jaws - and providing Migone with enough recording material for years. Crackers started as a sound installation in 1998, but was redone in performances and installations in Paris, Geneva and Los Angeles and as recently as this fall in Montreal at UQAM's gallery.
One of the recordings was a string of cracks from various parts of the body, edited closely together, bristling and alive with varying notes and textures: the music of wet popcorn, and strangely compelling to listen to.

"When presented in artists' talks or things like that, people have a dual reaction. Some kind of wince, and other people start cracking," he says. "What interests me is also the 'uncontrollable-ness' of that action. When you crack, it's a habit, it's a compulsion."

Some of his other work displays a penchant for recording obsessive-compulsive behaviours and bodily functions - like P, where the artist recorded 1,000 moments of urination while saying "P."
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"Crackers really helped me focus, and I did a fart record afterwards which kind of applied the same kind of restrictions and focus."

Creating with a blend of old-fashioned microphone recording and software editing, Migone keeps the technology simple to focus on the product and the idea.

"I try to downplay sound, in a sense, because (the work) gets pigeonholed. Most of the time it's not necessarily about the medium. I'm much more interested in the initial idea."

Steve Heimbecker agrees: "I think a lot of sound artists are really involved in the process as much or more than the outcome. ... Many of the ideas themselves are based on expanding technologies, (and) sometimes result in a piece that's interesting, sometimes not. ... The big discussion now is, 'What is the content?', because the technology's kind of flatlined - everything you can do with it has been imagined. "

But with the plethora of noise in our world, and since part of the artist's job description is to absorb and reflect human experience, the genre is constantly brushing up against the definition of music.

"(John) Cage thought everything was music," Migone says. "There's no such thing as silence - and he incorporated everything into music. And that's dangerous for sound art, because how does it carve out its own territory outside of (music)?"

montrealgazette.com

Sound Sights: To see more photos of the artists' works and link to more information about them on the Internet, go to Editor's Picks.

姚大鈞談《中國聲音藝術: 兩千五百年的聆聽》 （第一部分）

講座日期：2009年10月16日
地點：灣仔告士打道一號 香港演藝學院4樓 EDT Lab

姚大鈞, 聲音藝術家，唱片製作人，策展人，電台主持人，藝術史研究員。長年來透過電台節目、網站、及教學推動前衛音樂發展。曾策劃北京聲納、台北聲納、上海電子藝 術節河流體開幕式等大型新媒體及聲音藝術演出。九七年起組創「中國聲音小組」對中國各地市聲音現象進行研究、紀錄及創作。近年創作包括中國城市聲音裝置作 品系列，以不同的空間譬喻及聆聽方式探討中國各城市之聲音現象。在兩岸開創聲音藝術的系統教學，目前任教於中國美術學院新媒體藝術系。

公開講座：姚大鈞談《中國聲音藝術: 兩千五百年的聆聽》
(普通話主講, 英語補充)

謝謝大家在禮拜五的晚上抽空來這邊，我首先要抱歉因為我本來是來演出的，明天晚上和後天晚上要演出，今天晚上需要綵排，他們那邊已經開始綵排了，我是偷偷溜出來的，在這邊跟大家談完以後我必須趕回去，在8 點半要離開這裏，所以時間非常短，我希望把演講的部分儘量縮短，可以讓我們有更多的時間交流。因為我覺得跟大家交流是我比較有興趣的，而不是個人的演說，我希望不要把這次談話變成一個演講，一個很規矩的演講模式，因為我真的沒有寫好一個稿子， 但是我有一些材料希望跟大家分享。如果大家在我講的過程中有任何的疑問或想法，或有不清楚的地方，可以隨時舉手發問，就是希望大家不要把這作為正式的演講，因為我沒有寫好一篇演講稿。我們現開始進入主題——“中國人的聽音”，這個課題是非常有意思的，也是我個人研究了很多年的，但是這個主題並沒有人花太多功夫去研究，尤其是沒有從宏觀的角度去研究，也就是說，很多人研究古代的樂論，文獻，聽覺（跟音樂有關的文獻有大量的史料，注釋及學術論文），但是沒有人從它真正的本體，把它作為一個聽聲音的文獻或者說從聽聲音這件事情本身去研究文獻。我們都知道很多古代文獻，比如說《禮記》，《樂記》以及歐陽修的《秋聲賦》，這些都是我們耳熟能詳的東西，但是我們都從非常傳統的角度去看它，對於歐陽修的《秋聲賦》，我們一直把它當成文學作品，甚至是我們在中學需要背誦的一篇古文，而沒有從它的內容去看它到底是怎麼回事，所以今天我希望從一種新的角度來看大家可能已經接觸過的一些材料，從新的角度把它背後的真正意思揭開來，這些材料與西方接觸衝擊後產生的新的意義，這是我們主要的研究對象。

我現在換到另外一張畫，這張畫可能大家也看過，這是很有名的南宋的一幅畫。這幅畫現在在臺北的故宮博物院，它是古代非常著名的山水畫家馬遠的兒子馬嶺畫的《靜聽松風》(Quietly Listening to the Sounds of Pine-trees)。這幅畫非常有名，但一般我們研究它多半是從畫風，或畫的主題及對象，比如這個人的身份是什麼，我們關注它的構圖，一些美術史的關注，但這張畫經過我們今天晚上的討論以後， 大家會對它有不同的看法，有一種新的角度去分析它。

我們要從古代說起，古代的很多東西是我們熟悉的，我們熟悉它們的方式是用音樂、哲學、文學古文去認識它們，或是一種古畫的方式去認識它們。但是貫穿所有這些不同領域、不同媒體、媒材的各種不管是藝術或是文獻資料背後是一個很重要的事情——聆聽。聆聽在我看來非常拗口，小時候我們不會自己講或者聽到聆聽這個詞，因為聽就是聽，現在要把這個問題提高到一個理論的學術層面，所以我們用聆聽這個詞，但實際上它是很拗口的。中文裡面關於聽或是關於聲音的字眼是非常有限的，而且相當含混，比如說我們談聲音，噪音，音樂，這裏面都有音或者聲這個字，互相摻雜，混在一起，混淆不清的，這個時候我們可以看古代的樂論，其實就比我們現在的現代漢語的說法更清楚，比如說古代的樂論我們看一段，“To illustrate my point about the confusion of the terms for sounds, music and noise, in contemporary spoken Chinese, if we can compare to classical Chinese, it was clearly delineated that there are three kinds of things we are talking about listening and objects of listening. The first is sound, which is similar to what we have today referring to all kinds of things that is audible. So the first one is ‘Sheng’, and the next is ‘Yin’ or equivalent to musical notes. And the highest level is the musical work ‘Yue’. ”所以「聲」、「音」、「樂」三個是分的很清楚的，很多古代的東西從現代的角度看，或現代的東西從古代的角度看，會有很多的衝撞，在衝撞後產生新的意義，新的認識，新的瞭解。比較古雅的方法是相互發明，這裏說的發明不是發明家的發明，而是說互相得到引證，互相刺激，互相有新的東西產生出來。我最有興趣的是把古代和現代的放在一起對比，然後有一種新的意思我們可以看得出來。這是我個人覺得最有意思的事情，也是我們現在討論聽覺為什麼把最老的和最新的放在一起的原因，所以聽覺這件事情是沒有人研究過的，應該說在近代沒有人研究過。所以我們看羅蘭巴特在1976年寫的一篇文章裏面有一句話 “Listening does not figure in the encyclopedias of the past, it belongs to no knowledge discipline”，就是說聽聲音這件事情不屬於過去的任何一個學門，它不是被承認的一個學科。雖然我們都在聽音樂、做音樂、寫音樂，都在享受音樂、散播音樂，但是我們沒有研究聽覺這件事情或是聽這個動作。所以很有意思的是在西方傳統裏是羅蘭巴特這些，或是更早幾十年的法國具象音樂學派(Music Concrete)才把聽覺這件事情提高到一個很高層次，因為過去西方古希臘的音樂文獻或是早期關於和聲或律法的文獻裏面，主要對象是音樂而不是聲音，到了20世紀中期(the birth of Music Concrete)具象音樂產生，70年代結構主義學者羅蘭巴特才開始用厚澀的方法看聽覺這件事情，這個研究是非常新穎的，尤其在中文世界裏是很少人討論的，但是中國有雄厚的古代聽音文獻，所以中西方兩個碰撞在一起是很有意思的。

提問： 「聆」和「聽」是不一樣的，「聆」是比較專心的，在你們研究中，兩者有甚麼分別？

答：其實中文字裏關於聽的有：「聆」、「聽」、「聞」是有區別的，比如說「聽而不聞」，「聽」應該是最廣義的，「聞」是比較專注在一個對象上的，而「聆」我覺得是更加專注的，我沒有研究過，但我認為是有差別的。但是現代中文常常需要兩個字來組成雙音節，比如「聲音」 ,我們知道「聲」和「音」其實是不一樣的，但是放在一起，成了漢語，就混淆了它們的區別。「聆聽」也是，「聆」跟「聽」是不一樣的，當它們成了一個複合詞的時候，便失去了一個區分。

我們從古代的一些裝置來看古代人怎麼對付「聽」這件事情，把「聽」具體化、形象化。請看這個照片是編鐘，距今二千五百年左右的一件東西。仔細看的話，這個東西其實是非常可怕的、非常嚇人的。我們平常接觸到它時直覺得認為它是一個考古的、出土的文物，不會把它當作一個聲音的儀器或是作品來看，但是你看它的複雜程度，不只是製作它本身相當複雜，是高度的科學技術和知識，在當時是高科技的。同時在看不到的那一部分，它背後藏著是非常可怕的、非常早熟的調律的知識。我們知道，這一套鐘，它是十二音的，在西方當時是沒有這麼完備的十二音的調律方式。所以中國古代人花了很大心血，在很多的心力放在聽覺這件事情，不只是音樂，它的重要性超過了音樂，在「聽」本身。

剛才我們提到了這個十二音的調律，調律是一個非常值得注意的現象，因為調律也就是tuning，它在西方是被當作樂理、聲響學的一部分，而在中國，調律絕對不只限於樂理或音樂上的意義，它是政治層面的一個重要區塊，翻開中國政史，古有廿五史，每個政史裏都有一個章節叫律治，在這個章節裏談的不是音樂。而實際上中國音樂經過這麼多時代，它的變化其實也不是那麼大，所以沒有那麼多可以談的。律治這個章節裏談的是調律的方式，調律是不是調得對，和諧不和諧會影響一個朝代或推翻前一個朝代的新政權的執政的合法性成功與否，影響到政治上的結果。所以調律被賦予了很高的政治含義，更廣來看，不只是政治，而且是中國人宇宙觀的一部分，tuning is a part of Chinese cosmological system, that is way beyond just political content，音樂、調律、天文、星相在古人看來是一體的。我們都知道五行這些算命，在古代是holistic，是一體的，它不是個別的。所以音樂這個調律跟其他的各種屬性要了解的話，我們就要現在看一個律法圖，每個音階上的音跟每個月份、方向都聯繫在一起。它是非常完整的，一個整體性的宇宙觀。剛才看的這個東西是祭祀用的禮器，同時也可以演奏的，也是一種樂器。但是如果把它放在今天看，把它放在一個展覽空間，它是一個很了不起的，是非常嚇人的裝置藝術。可以在雙年展、三年展馬上一炮而紅，因為它的造型非常可觀，背後技術很強，還可以發出聲音，它是一個聲音裝置藝術。但是我們要作一個區別，在古代，它先是主要作為樂器，之後再變成禮器，比如說在陪葬的時候，它就作為一種禮器。

聲音裝置藝術在藝術史、美學史上是一個很重要的轉捩點。我覺得聲音裝置的出現和流行普及及被炒作是人類幾千年音樂傳統的最終的終結。它比日本的噪音理論更早，這被視作是反音樂的發展，跟音樂本體的定義是完全相反的，它們做出來的不是音樂，是反音樂。但是如果退後一步更宏觀來看，不管是John Cage還是日本秋田倉美的極端暴力噪音理論，他們討論的題材還是聽覺。不管是聽得舒服還是不舒服、聽起來是暴力還是協和的，有節奏還是沒有節奏的，討論的還是聽，所言它們都是聽覺、音樂藝術廣義上延伸。為什麼說今天的聲音裝置藝術是人類音樂文化的終結，因為它開始讓人不再聽了，如放在美術館或是雙年展裏的一件裝置藝術，你多半的注意力會放在它視覺的構成，它的造型和它的實體，而可能對它的聲音並不那麼感興趣。這個影響是很了不起的，做得很好的一件裝置藝術。我們今天看大多數的市面上流行的裝置藝術作品，它們聲音的結果其實是我們不關注的。我覺得作為一件聲音的作品或是音樂作品，它唯一能夠作為判斷的標準就是我們願不願把我們生命裏的時間奉獻給這個作品，比如一個交響曲三十、四十分鐘，我們願不願意用四十分鐘的時間去聽一首現場的交響曲或家裏的唱片。如果真的是好的作品，我會不只一次甚至好多次反覆地花四十分鐘去聽。但是現在的聲音裝置藝術，我們可以做一個旁觀者來看聲音裝置藝術跟觀眾之間的互動情況怎樣，我們觀察到很多觀眾走到這個聲音裝置前面，看一看它的牌子，是誰做的、年份是多少、它背後的技術是什麼、是什麼樣的感應器、什麼樣的互動、用到什麼軟體硬體，瞭解以後，大概看一看，可能就走到下一個作品。所以我認為聲音裝置藝術已經變成一個反音樂(anti-music)，因為我們不再聽了，我們只是把它當成一個造型藝術來評價來衡量它的價值，而它的聲音那部分，只不過是把它成為一個能夠發聲的裝置藝術。(It’s an installation with sound instead of a sound installation.)

我們看古代人聽音的廣度，隨便舉一些例子，這個東西可能大家不太注意到，在墨子的時代，2500年的時候就有完整文字記錄的文獻可以證明的一件中國人的發明——「地聽」跟「甕聽」。這是宋代軍事百科全書裏《五金總要》的一個插圖，這個插圖非常簡陋，但是我們可以看到地聽的構造，它實際上就是一個大的甕、大的瓦罐。我把這把個放在一起，這是出自《中國聲學史》這一部很重要的教科書裡面的，放在一起就發現這個瓦罐實際上就是一個 tempo resonated。中國古代人當然沒有一個resonated的概念，但他們知道這個東西的特性。「地聽」（geophone）是在古代被當作戰爭防備的武器，它不是用來攻擊的武器，而是防備的時候需要用的一個設備。先在地上挖一個大洞，把大的瓦罐埋在裏面，再派一個人坐到裏面去聽。因為在古代攻城的時候會有挖地道，要想知道敵人挖地道的進度和方向，必須通過地聽的裝置來探測。所以它是防衛的時候一個重要的軍時設備。這個很有意思，我們從今天的角度來看，它是一個非常早的發明。現在我們多半用geophone來聽埋在地下的油管是不是漏油，越戰時美軍用來geophone監聽地下越共挖地道。中國人是很早就應用geophone。

剛才提到我喜歡新的跟舊的結合、衝擊，我也曾經為南京這個城市做的一個作品叫《地聽南京》。希望用地聽這個模式建構一個空間，在裡面可以聽到四方有不同的聲音傳過來，模擬從前地聽的概念。我們當然不可能在畫廊挖一個地洞，所以做了一個地地面上的空間。

Industrial Bloom By Christopher Dewolf

Earlier this year, in the last few days before the heat of summer, nearly 50,000 people visited the Hong Kong International Art Fair, a 65% jump in attendance over last year. It's another step up for the aspiring capital of Asia's art market, a city where auction houses sold $502 million in art last year alone. But while collectors flock to Hong Kong to scoop up works by popular mainland Chinese artists such as Yue Minjun and Zhang Xiaogang, Hong Kong's real artistic vanguard can be found 40 minutes by train from the city center, in the grimy industrial area of Fo Tan, where artists work next to sausagemakers and metalsmiths in hulking, derelict factories. For years, manufacturers have been fleeing to cheaper pastures in China, so Hong Kong, notorious for high rents, has had a surplus of vacant industrial space. The result has been an explosion of creativity.

Fo Tan's pioneering artists arrived in the early 2000s, when a sluggish economy and the SARS crisis sent rents tumbling. Now there are more than 200 in the area, many of them graduates of the nearby Chinese University of Hong Kong. While there's nothing new about artists setting up shop in obsolete industrial areas — it happened in New York City's SoHo in the 1960s and Beijing's Dashanzi in the 1990s — its impact in Hong Kong has been profound. There are now more full-time artists than ever before and they're catching the eye of both local and international publics. In January, more than 10,000 people flocked to Fo Tan's annual open-studios event. (See the 10 reasons to visit Hong Kong's NoHo.)

The district has given "a lot of people space and a community that wasn't there before," says Tobias Berger, a German curator who worked at Hong Kong's Para/Site Art Space during the years of Fo Tan's emergence. He and other curators helped draw attention to the district's artists, and since then a number of them have made a mark at international events like the Venice Biennale and in galleries as far afield as Sydney and Stockholm. "And it's not only Fo Tan," Berger says. "There's more happening now in other parts of the city too."

Kacey Wong, 38, has seen the transformation firsthand. Trained as an architect, he began working on conceptual-art installations in the 1990s. Last year, Wong dressed up as a skyscraper at the Subvision Festival in Hamburg, and in 2008, his installation Wandering Home, a miniature Hong Kong apartment set atop a tricycle, was shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale. (See pictures of Hong Kong.)

"Usually, the artist grows in scale to the studio," he says, recalling how he started off working in his mom's living room. "I was making this 20-ft.-long crocodile out of corrugated cardboard. It was a huge mess. Suddenly, I heard the keychain jangling by the door and it was my mom coming home. I froze with such a feeling of guilt. That's when I realized I needed my own space." Like other local artists, Wong had long carried with him the stigma of working in an inscrutable profession that was rarely lucrative or even feasible. "Before, people were just doing art at home and getting yelled at by their parents," says Wong. "These days, a fresh graduate from art school can share a studio for HK$1,000 [$130] a month. It's a system that allows people to grow as artists."

Casper Chan is hoping to do just that. After graduating from Chinese University's art school two years ago, the 25-year-old painter spent some time renting a studio with former classmates. "My work wouldn't have been so large if I hadn't had a studio," she says. (Her series of Hong Kong teenagers rendered on big wood panels stands in testament to that fact.) Being in Fo Tan also gave her a shot at greater exposure. "A lot of gallery owners came to the open-studio days and talked to me and invited me to have a show," she says. (See the top 10 Chinese knockoffs.)

Some artists have gone a step further, using their studios to market themselves and each other. Last year, photographer Quist Tsang joined up with two friends to open Hidden Culture in another run-down industrial district in east Kowloon. The venture serves as a work space and exhibition venue for emerging artists. "We are not popular, we are not famous, but we have passion for the things we do," says Tsang.

Since studio space became more readily available, Hong Kong artists have grown more sophisticated says Tang Ying-chi, herself a mixed-media artist and the editor of the coffee-table volume Oasis: Artists' Studios in Hong Kong. "Their work has become more complex than 10 or 20 years ago, when there were more watercolors and Chinese ink paintings. Now they use everyday materials in their work. It's more closely connected to the city they live in."

But they aren't the only ones to have noticed the potential of old industrial premises. Property developers are keen on putting them to use too, and they have successfully pressured the government to make it easier to convert former factories into apartments, offices and even hotels. Rents are already skyrocketing. Last month, Chan was evicted from her studio after her landlord sold it. At the same time, the bigger the arts community becomes, the louder its voice gets. Artists' complaints about rising rents have caught the ear of a government keen to address the charges of philistinism historically leveled at Hong Kong by fostering the development of local creativity. More subsidized space for artists is in the pipeline — so is a study to determine just how many artists are out there. If the phenomenon of Fo Tan is anything to go by, the answer could be higher than anyone supposes.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2008795,00.html#ixzz0w1x6qXEk