Disembodied Meditation
(April 2005; MIT Press)
by TJ Norris

I created Genometrics as Part I of Tribryd, a three-part installation series. I began the series in 2001 as a way to play with invisible, barely microscopic worlds. Through basic linguistic play and assorted reference sounds I styled the work from the remnants of street graffiti imagery washed away by city workers and those of natural urban/architectural decay. Dots and pigments became bubbly white sculptures and plexiglass silhouettes. The project became an incubator for imaginary contemporary sciences, filtering fantasy DNA, cloning and other genetic forensics. Realizing the project was born from a sound space, where silence held a bold void presence, I asked three sound artists to join me in creating compositions that would be used to mold each sculptural element in the exhibition. Each composer designed an original soundtrack for an imaginary space that would then influence the overall production of the installation piece-in-progress. The sculptural elements for the installation intentionally incorporates both natural (wood, beeswax, twine) and synthetic (mylar, dacron, plexiglass, cdr/boombox) materials. The completed work has interactive and atmospheric elements. Seeking to create a sense of double entendre, I use sculptural shapes in the formation of old radios, orbs and tunnels (voids) that make incidental references designed to lead the audience through mysterious metaphors that infer communication structure and breakdown. My use of translucent media including plexiglass and mylar, glycerine and beeswax, while minimal, is intended to achieve a luminescent, floating effect. I find that a nonlinear model, without captions or descriptors, aids in defining an invisible process through the passive symbiosis of the viewer with the installation. Dreams of falling, jumping and flying come into play as elements that dangle from the ceiling move with the air around them, in contrast to the digital images I created for the original construction of the work which are stark and almost could be considered flat still lives. The images reference both human mark-making (graffiti) and that of nature (wind, rain, rust) throughout. This was the first "cell" of the process. Each image acted like a drawing, a blueprint, for lines that formed sounds and the sounds in turn influenced the formation of sculptural tableaus in the final presentation. Themes of time, age/distress and the illusion of imperfection emerged. While designing Untitled (Six Inside) (see Fig. 1), I was immediately struck by the birth/origins of mass-broadcast radio when replaying the composition by the Netherlands' electro-acoustic band Beequeen, its soundtrack. The piece uses both digital and analogue sinewave signals and other sound samples. I built the piece to resemble a flattened and anonymous version of an original 1920s Philco radio; its shape, as viewers responded, could be reminiscent of anything from a tombstone or a missile and its anonymity served for such dialogue. The work has a strong physical sense of silence and by using headphones I intend to bring the viewer closer to the piece to experience an atonal sound work that offsets the raw, static nature of the piece.

For Untitled (Ground Two) (see Fig. 1), I worked with a carpenter to construct a cube using both natural and industrial material (wood and Plexiglas). The piece blurs the lines between mechanical and voice samples as Chicago's Illusion of Safety's composition "Ground Two" reshapes the sounds of schoolyard children playing with improvised strings and various hollow pops making the listening experience intimate and animated. I present my fractured internalization of memory by using a strobe light to capture something of a real-time flashback. Untitled (Bestesends) has a formidable sense of containment, the residue of something secretive. I used organic compounds that naturally separate when conjoined (glycerin and beeswax). The objects I formed with them to accompany the sound work developed with New York's Humectant Interruption evokes the mass production of a single cell (through cloning). By using sound as the impetus for creating free-standing objects, it is my hope that unlike modern science, Genometrics might be realized as more of an experiment in Zen meditation than a typical art making modality. Art as ritual projects an experiential point of view, and the process of experiencing the entire Tribryd series should remain seamless for the observant audience to best investigate and interact. I also suggest that numerology imparts a certain power to the work, as all parts of the piece wind up in three parts, trilogies and otherwise the number 3 as an integral method of working. In forensics, the use of contemporary methods assists in researching the forbidden, hidden impracticalities that can unlock truths not seen by the eye. That which is intangible is imagined, and imagination transcends the common senses. My work replicates this way of thinking by offering an environment that is open to both interpretation and to the viewer's re-examination of assumed hidden meanings. The arts form a richly interrelated breeding ground, creating their own universal language as sound and visual elements intersect. These balance disparate psychic energies in the work's development of patterning, tonality and overall composition.

Fig. 1.
TJ Norris, (foreground) Untitled (Ground Two), wood, plexiglass, strobe, boombox, digital print on vinyl (2003); (background) Untitled (Six Inside), plastic, wood, CD players, light source, 2003. ( TJ Norris)