Installations

Stasis Shift

10 February-10 March 2024, Platforme Intermédia

Audioblast, APO-33, Nantes, France

Sound is vibration - molecules jostling each other to form pressure waves. Every movement causes a vibration and thus sound, or a sound thus a vibration. In an imagined future of overpopulation and over mechanisation, the vibratory levels have become untenable. Laws are passed to quell the shaking, silence the sounding. In this future where excess vibrational energy is a crime, the act of bio-mechanical listening is the ultimate subversive act.

Five Self-Vibrating Regions of Intensities

Gail Priest & Thomas Burless - The Institute of Non-Empirical Results

13 April-20 May 2023, The Substation, Melbourne

Five Self-Vibrating Regions of Intensities is a study of sound as energy. Across five installations Gail Priest and Thomas Burless explore the transmission of sonic energy through materials and its visual manifestations as wave-driven geometric patterns (cymatics). It documents the experiments of Gail and Thomas, working together as The Institute of Non-Empirical Results.  The Institute of Non-Empirical Results, in which they develop kinetic objects and assemblages that creatively demonstrate sound as vibration.

Here Now Hear

site-responsive sound, text and visualworks

Blindside Gallery, Melbourne, 11 October - 4 November 2023

Our Neon Foe, Sydney, 29 September - 1 October 2022

An ongoing project in which Gail takes sounds from the gallery environment creating compositions, textual responses and visual works such as wall tracings and spectral zither pieces. The visual components are inspired by the graphical tools found within digital software used to visualise the frequencies of sounds. In this way she is exploring a re-materialisation of her primarily digital sound-making practice.

Image: video still Sam James 

Songs with Oscillators

part of Glossolalia curated by Matt Warren & Colin Langridge

6 May-25 June 2022, Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania & Dark MOFO

In Songs with Oscillators Gail is exploring the connections, interplays and contrasts of the organic voice and the machinic sounds produced by audio oscillators, specifically the sine wave and the square wave. The audio works are accompanied by their waveforms rendered as large-scale wall tracings. Gail started exploring this concept in 2011, and there have been iterations at SNO Gallery (2011) and Home@735 (2014), Sydney.

Image: Glossolalia, 2022, Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania, photo Eden Meure.

SonoLexic

2017-2020, Experimenta Make Sense Triennial of Media Art National tour

SonoLexic is an exploration of how we process the listening experience through language. Foregrounding the intimate cross-modal association of sound and words, the artwork proposes a new variant of synaesthesia – ‘ideathesia’.

Concept, text, sound and video: Gail Priest
Object design and fabrication: Thomas Burless (tomikeh).

An Experimenta and Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) Commission.

Runic Engine: Industrial Dreaming

8 November-10 December 2016, Sonoretum, Kapelica Gallery, Lubljana, Slovenia

The 'Runic Engine' is a chance-based compositional structure derived from the format of a simple reading of the divinatory symbols called runes. Based on the interactive installation Urban Runes, this self-playing version was designed for the 8-speaker public sound space, the Sonoretum, at Kapelica.

Concept and sound: Gail Priest
Max/MSP programming: Wade Marynowsky
Image: Samuel James

Sounding the Future 2014-2017

Australia Council Emerging & Experimental Arts Fellowship

installation, curated exhibition, radiophonic works, publication

Sounding the Future brings together the worlds of speculative fiction and audio art. Through an intensive program of research and creative development predictions are made as to what art in future will sound like. This act of prediction is inevitably informed by the present and thus it takes stock of the sound of art today.

Concept, sound, texts video: Gail Priest
Original Programming: Julien Pauthier
Additional programming: Max
Furniture design: Thomas Burless

Urban Runes

Between Site and Space (Japan/Australia exchange)

March 2009, Artspace residency and exhibition

Urban Runes uses a set of strange symbols gathered from the walls of mostly deserted industrial spaces. These are then used, in the manner of of ancient runes, to tell the participant's fortune, but instead of using text or language the fortune told is through sound. Each rune uses a specific field recording of industrial or noisy domestic origin. By teasing and torturing the sonic material, hidden voices are discovered and these industrial spaces begin to sing.

Concept, sound, images: Gail Priest
Max/MSP programming: Wade Marynowsky

28 Songs for a City: Tokyo

Diorama of a City: Between Site and Space (Japan/Australia exchange)

13 September-13 October 2008, Tokyo Wonder Site Shibuya

28 locations
28 live improvisations with the city
28 earprints to mark the spot

Over 28 days Gail went to different locations in Tokyo to make audio recordings. Listeneing to the sounds around her she then sang back what I heard, improvising a small tune with the city. In return for this sonic sample she left a token of her appreciation—a temporary imprint of my presence in the shape of an ear