Olivia Block Home Page

Chicago Tribune

ART SCENE

Olivia Block creates a bit of art for the ears

By Nina Metz

Special to the Tribune

January 9, 2004

Stepping from a cold blustery day into the humid warmth of Lincoln Park Conservatory is like entering a Russian bathhouse while fully clothed. Glasses fog up, sweat sprouts on your upper lip, and suddenly you're desperate to peel off your layers. Look around and you'll see staffers hosing the plants. They're wearing shorts and T-shirts.

It's a slightly discombobulating experience--this immediate, drastic temperature change--but it's good to feel a little off balance as you wander through the elaborate greenhouse and into the fern room, where Olivia Block's hydro-sonic installation, "Transgenesis," runs on a constant loop.

The audio exhibition, part of the Conservatory's ongoing series featuring the work of sound artists, continues through the end of February. The fern room has speakers permanently installed, one at each corner, specifically for the series, which often commissions work from composers who participate in the Outer Ear Festival of Sound, the only sonic arts festival in the Midwest. These aural compositions are not strictly musical in nature, although many do have a musicality to them, including Block's 11-minute piece.

There's a placard at the entrance to the fern room explaining the fauna within: "Many types of plants in this room grew at the time of the dinosaurs," but stop reading and listen for a moment.

Block's composition begins to fill the room. A sonic trickle at first, growing to an outright gurgle. It gets louder, fuller, and sounds--thanks to the placard's power of suggestion--as if you are buried deep within the recesses of a dinosaur's stomach during a rather thorough digestive moment. A burp seems almost inevitable.

But instead, Block shifts the dynamic subtly, and the churning becomes a torrential deluge of water. A flushing that keeps going and going, before slowly, ever so gradually, receding to a trickle. Occasionally, there's a tinkley sound, as if a metal bottle cap were being jostled in a sewer drain.

At first listen, all sounds organic. But in fact, Block has created the entire piece by electronic means, and after a while, your ear does, in fact, pick up on this.

Block mainly used old-school methods--a digital 8-track recorder, instead of newer software--and layered the sound of digital feedback played at a very slow rate to create what she calls a "liquid texture." She manufactured a series of small clicks that she ran through several filtering and boosting processes. The resulting watery sounds emerge by virtue of the extreme frequency changes. The entire process took about two months, including several visits to the fern room.

Her working methods may be technical, but the audio experience itself is anything but. Walking the full length of the room, Block's composition begins to blend with the Conservatory's indigenous sounds: mini-waterfalls that empty into two small ponds, water rushing through overhead pipes, sprays of mist drenching the plants.

The effect is intentional.

"I wanted [them] to be almost indistinguishable," Block says, "but not quite. . . . It was important for the sound to be right on the border between natural and artificial, so that it might take a while for the listener to notice."

The composition's title is a blend of the words transgenic and genesis, which Block says relates to "the implications of a new kind of creation or concept of life designed differently, by human, scientific means, instead of `natural' or even `divine' processes. I wanted to play with the idea that evolution is changing to a system where the forms which used to live in wild environments are now being protected and raised in very monitored environments, such as the Nature Conservatory."

There may be something to that, but strictly speaking, the audio sensation, blended with the sights, smells and air texture of the room, is not so much intellectual as it is visceral.

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`Transgenesis'

When: Through Feb. 28

Where: Lincoln Park Conservatory, 2391 N. Stockton Drive

Price: Free; 773-742-7736