Stephen Vitiello
DiverseWorks
- Garland Fielder -
Stephen Vitiello, Four Color Sound, 2008; installation view, DiverseWorks, Houston
Immersed in a soundscape of audible chatter, fog and pulsating light, it is easy to succumb to a sort of active ambiance in Stephen Vitiello’s installation at DiverseWorks. A celebrated sound sculptor and electronic noisemaker, Vitiello presents seamless environments that have the ability to produce profound effects on the viewer. Four Color Sound consists of two “movements.” In the first gallery, the viewer encounters Light Readings(s): a large projection against a freestanding wall in the center of the room. The visuals are kinetic and frenzied, pulsating rhythmically, but the orientation of the projection faces backwards, so the viewer is inclined to walk right past the work and into the next gallery. The second, larger room contains Four Color Sound, which consists of ten floor-mounted stage lights that pulse and syncopate through cycles of blue, red, yellow and green. Speakers mounted on the walls loop through various ambient—and not so ambient—patterns.
Vitiello also incorporated a fog machine in the installation, which produces a sort of atmospheric link throughout the building. Obscuration of the space helps calm the viewer; a carpeted floor invites visitors to sit down and become enveloped by the work. After some time, it becomes apparent that the space containing Four Color Sound is meant as a meditation chamber in which one is able to fully focus on the video piece projected in the adjacent room. The whole apparatus of Four Color Sound is very cinematic and Kubrick-like. Vitiello has created a certain symmetry between the two rooms that frames the projection wall like a monolith. Color and sound cycle, becoming a mantra that lulls the viewer into a participatory role, devouring the experience as a coherent stream of consciousness that contains its own inherent logic.
Vitiello teamed up with Houstonian Jeremy Choate to create these fluid light pulsations, which work best in the realm of peripheral vision. When focusing on just one of the lights, the room tilts off kilter. When focused on the video, however, the lights—positioned equidistant from the center of the room—resonate, forming a visual cocoon, perceptibly elevating one’s position in the space. This allows for a multisensory dynamic while viewing the video. The electronic music, at times, reminds one of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma and at others, a fanciful soundtrack for Don DeLillo’s White Noise, full of helicopters chopping through the air amidst a barely containable pandemonium.
The obvious solution here is to try and connect the ambient looped sounds playing in the gallery to the projection. There is a sort of reconciliation between the various elements but not a linear or literal one. Moments of syncopation may seem planned, but in reality, the elements are congealing anew all the time. Vitiello’s interest is not so much in the ambient sounds he collects, edits and reinterprets but, rather, the cognitive space in which those elements exist. It is the site of recognition that is of import, and Vitiello’s installation functions as a petri dish—fertile ground for investigations of the cranial realm.
Garland Fielder is an artist and writer based in Houston.