Audio Tunnel by Cobi van Tonder :: part of Stanford MFA Art Practice Thesis Show, May 12 – June 15, 2009, Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery, Stanford University.

Conceptually, this work challenges ideas of territory, control, transmission, tranception and how we listen to the world. Ultimately it is about a very complex and delicate sonic texture. We access the constructed space via our auditory perception. Through listening we perceive a landscape that in turn triggers the imagination to construct a picture of what this space looks like. It becomes a partly imaginary space yet it is a shared space. It is live and interactive: the participant becomes the transmitter and is transmitted/ displaced (in sound) in many actual places in fractions of milliseconds. A recursive eavesdropping becomes possible in this unseen territory.

Live sound travels from location to location, reverberating in each space. A kind of anonymity reverberates through the piece. It is a borderless territory designed for listening. Acoustically the reverberations and other characteristics of each space add up, thus creating a new recombinant space that is the distorted and warped sum of its parts.

directional audio tunnel – loudspeaker to microphone to network device to loudspeaker to microphone to network device and so on … traveling around the world through sound.