ORB: PLACING INTO VIBRATION



A Group exhibition at Audio Foundation by Teresa Peters, Charyl Farthing and Torben Tilly



13 July - 13 August, 2022
Audio Foundation
Hours: Mon-Sat 12pm - 4pm





Our world is a complex matrix of vibrating energy, matter and air just as we are made of vibrations. Vibration connects us with all beings and connects us to all things interdependently … quantum listening is listening in as many ways as possible simultaneously — changing and being changed by the listening … perception at the edge of the new. Jumping like an atom out of orbit to a new orbit — creating a new orbit…[it] takes us below the surface of our consciousness and helps to change or dissolve limiting boundaries.



Spinning chthonic bodies into audio-visual spheres, Teresa Peters, Cheryl Farthing and Torben Tilly create patterns of ever shifting moments of connection and discordance, manifesting touch as alchemy, “… and by touching [the aural with the visual] put into play the whole system of the senses”



Teresa Peters explores ceramics as a crystalline matrix from deep time to deep house — transforming clay into fluid digital realms and quartz vibration. Navigating collections to collective consciousness — recent projects echo “the club” or “healing circle” as collective spaces of transformative experience.



Touch as a geomorphic force. Haptics and piezoelectric pressure on quartz trigger ceramics glazes, volcanic eruptions, communication devices like mobile phones, satellites and the human third eye — transmitting, electricity information and sound. We resonate with the frequencies of quartz crystals as every cell in the human body has a geometric crystalline structure. Ammonites to Ammolite — breaking new ground.



The artist Robert Smithson conceived the term “time-crystal” — a metaphor for time without end. Rather than considering time as organic and linear like a tree or river, he saw in the crystal form a temporal model based on fragmentation, repetition and extension, opening up new possibilities for mapping the shapes of time.



The brain and the earth share the processual structuration that expands into what he calls abstract geology, which also enables a different way of understanding technology, unrestricted to the actual technological devices and systems. In Two Mirrored Crystal Structures 1965, he evaded language and performed the description of the work as an uninterrupted hum.



Cheryl Farthing plays flute, sansula, drums and chimes, a powerful shimmering, multi-layered resonance. They accompany traditional quartz crystal sounding bowls, used in healing for hundreds of years that ripple through the body like a natural ultrasound — touched by their alchemy we are forever transformed.



An infinitesimal cut of quartz, stimulated by electricity, vibrates at a steady frequency. Quartz crystal sounding bowls, born into shape, activated by striking or rubbing, vibrate a complex chord of inharmonic partials. In the space between harmonics and inharmonics lies a psychedelic realm of imaginary tones.


Taking cues from spectral and minimalist music traditions alongside the healing aspirations of new age and deep listening music, Torben Tilly explores the psychoacoustic properties of combination tones within simple, repetitive, trance-like musical shapes and forms which evoke the mirror planes, rotational axes, and inversion centres that pertain to a crystal’s symmetrical elements.



In conversation with Teresa Peters’ kaleidoscopic clay-based moving image work and the microtonal vibrations of Cheryl Farthings’ collection of quartz sounding bowls, together they investigate a crystalline inter-connectedness — between the material qualities of sound, the digital, moving image, and object that manifests as an act of ‘placing-into-vibration’.






1. Pauline Oliveros, excerpts from Quantum Listening: From Practice to Theory (To Practice Practice). Accessed 25 June 2022. 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, Fordham University Press, New York, 2007.
3. Teresa Peters. disastrousforms.com & moltenentities.com
4.  Amelia Barikin, Robert Smithson’s Crystal Lattices: Mapping the Shapes of Time. Accessed 25 June 2022.
5.  Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 2015.
6.  Francois J. Bonnet, Underneath Listening in Spectres Volume 1: Composer l’écoute/Composing listening, Shelter Press, 2019





Teresa Peters



Teresa Peters works in clay, ceramics, moving image and photography, she is a filmmaker in collaboration with Florian Habicht. She “excavates’ primordial “artefacts” and navigates pseudo – archaeology and abstract geology. Molten entities in intimate combustion. Navigating the prehistoric futuristic, she fuses earth bodies into fluid digital realms and “archives” them as photographic artefacts. ECHOES won the Portage Premier Ceramic Award 2021, at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery– the first work in the 21 year awards history to be presented as a photograph.

DISASTROUSFORMS.COM, 2020 is a body of ceramic and clay artefacts from a faux sci-fi disaster, archived on an online platform – exploring natural disasters, natural history and archiving. Disaster as the mother of revolution. It is inspired by/archived with Auckland Museum Collections Online and made with the support of Creative New Zealand. Echoing Berlin club culture and drawing museum collections out into the civic centre. It launched on the Auckland Live Digital Stage, as a large-scale cosmic audio- visual event in 2021. MOLTENENTITIES.COMNotes on moving mountains at RM Gallery, as part of From Things Flow, July 2021 explored the transformative qualities of quartz into an audio-visual QUARTZ SOUND JOURNEY in collab with sound healer Cheryl Farthing.

TERESAPETERS.STUDIO


Torben Tilly




Torben Tilly was born in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau. While his practice is often sound and music-based, it also traverses the fields of moving image, object-making and installation. Recent work considers the complexities of time and its apprehension through a variety of mediums, in many cases with site-specific concerns. He has produced numerous original scores for artists’ film and has a long history of making and performing experimental music. His music projects have been widely distributed on record labels in New Zealand, Australia, U.S.A. and Europe. In recent years he has been lecturing in sound design at Auckland University of Technology.

Some notable exhibitions & performances include:
Easter Piano Meditations: Parts 1—4, Chartwell Project commissioned composition to accompany Dane Mitchell’s Post-hoc NTS radio broadcast work, 2022.
Radio/rain [with Katrina Beekhuis], Windows, Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Dunedin, 2020.
Short & Medium Wave Radio (1974) by Phil Dadson, performed by Sam Longmore, Rachel Shearer, Torben Tilly, Flo Wilson, A Room That Echoes Festival, Audio Foundation, 2021, and Auckland Art Gallery, 2019.
City of Tomorrow, original score for film by Gavin Hipkins, including multi-channel sound installation for Gavin Hipkins: The Domain, The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, 2017.
Object as Score, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, 2015.
Nobody But You, Audio Foundation, Auckland, 2013.
Object Lessons: A Musical Fiction [with Robin Watkins], Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, 2010.


Cheryl Farthing


Cheryl Farthing is a certified iRest and Iyengar yoga teacher and sound healer. She began her healing journey into sound thirteen years ago using Hemi-sync music for meditation. She practices music and sound as therapy, vibrational healing and vibration touches every part of our physical being right down to the cellular level. In her sound work she uses traditional instruments such as quartz crystal sounding bowls that have been used for healing purposes for hundreds of years. Her meditation practice and teaching draws on Buddhism, and mindfulness techniques.

https://www.theyogastudio.co.nz/soundscape.html


 

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Image Credits: Exhibition Texts: Sarah Callesen - exhibition poster

SoundBleed is an online journal of critical writing around sound in NZ/Aotearoa – a forum for discussion around sound-related activity and practice.

HOME

LINKS



SoundBleed is an online journal of critical writing around sound in NZ/Aotearoa – a forum for discussion around sound-related activity and practice.

Image Credits: Exhibition Texts:
Sarah Callesen - exhibition poster