Bill Fontana
Primal Energies (Book)
The first survey of sculptures and installations by sound-art pioneer Bill Fontana
Sound
Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture, Instrument Building and Acoustically Tuned Spaces opened at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in the summer of 1979 (and was also on view later that year at PS1 in New York). Curated by Bob Wilhite and Robert Smith, the exhibition surveyed the field of sound art. The forty-four participants were painters pivoted toward performance, conceptual artists attracted to time-based mediums, self-styled creators of environments, and musicians (formally…
Landscape Sculpture with Fog Horns
In 1982, Bill Fontana mounted a monumental outdoor sound installation called Landscape Sculpture with Fog Horns that would near-impossible to realize today. Live audio feeds from eight foghorns around the San Francisco Bay were routed to a central listening arena on city’s waterfront at Fort Mason. As a pioneer in the developing field of Sound Art, Fontana’s fusion of sound and sculpture was virtually unheard of, much less on the region-encompassing scale that he was working with for Landscape S…
Australian Sound Sculptures
Two amazing sound droning sculptures works by environmental sound artist Bill Fontana. In Fontana's words, "I was fascinated with how familiar sound sources had many possible acoustical perspectives, and how the simultaneous perception of these possible perspectives could transform the acoustical meaning of the sound." In 'Kirribilli Wharf' (1976), Fontana's goal was to capture the sounds of a water environment from multiple acoustical perspectives, and to accomplish that he placed microphones i…
Gong +
2002 release. Gong + presents three previously-unpublished compositions by Philip Corner recorded in New York City, 1974. "Metal Meditations with Listening Center," a 29-minute long piece, is a collaboration between Philip Corner and Bill Fontana. At that time Bill Fontana was very interested in the resonance properties of every object, putting his ear to everything, and sometimes recording what he called "Listening Centers," a microphone placed in a resonating space (for example a jar, or a pip…