Bill Fontana and sonic supplementarity: River Sounding

"Maps are about relationships. In other words, they are about how one landscape – a landscape of roads, rivers, cities, government, sustenance, poison, the good life, […] – is positioned in relation to another. The map synthesizes these diverse landscapes, projecting them onto and into one another."

River Sounding (detail of light wells) Bill Fontana 2010 Audiovisual installation, Somerset House Photograph by Claire Reddleman

River Sounding disrupts the visual hegemony of cartography by presenting a sonic map in which sounds are symbolic. This map presents the relations between the mapped subject and, unusually, the sonic symbols of it, and in this way offers a counterpoint to the traditionally visual representation of place[1].

River Sounding (detail of speakers in light wells) Bill Fontana 2010 Audiovisual installation, Somerset House Photograph by Claire Reddleman

The artist's act of selection foregrounds the ways in which cartography 'collapses' sound as a feature of reality, highlighting the supremacy or hegemony of the visual. River Sounding offers a doubled response to this visual hegemony, and, ultimately suggests an 'infinite regression' or 'hyperreal' character of the reality arising from cartographic representation. Bill Fontana (b.1947) is a "sound sculptor"[2] and composer known for his installation-based works that bring contrasting sounds into particular public or built spaces. He studied with the composer John Cage in the late 1960s at the New School for Social Research in New York, and developed an interest in ambient sounds and the combination of sound and sculpture.[3] Fontana describes his method as "sculptural thinking"[4] and his mission as "the transformation and deconstruction of the visual with the aural."[5] Other key works involving sound environments include Sound Island (Paris, 1994), in which he broadcast sounds from Normandy beaches at the Arc de Triomphe, and Speeds of Time (London, 2005) in which the internal sounds of Big Ben were transferred into a gallery.

River Sounding (detail of coal hole Teddington Lock) Bill Fontana 2010 Audiovisual installation, Somerset House Photograph by Claire Reddleman

River Sounding is a site-specific audiovisual installation, prepared for the semi-subterranean light wells and coal-holes at Somerset House, London, 15th April – 31st May 2010. Audio and visual recordings were made at different locations along the River Thames, and broadcast in the light wells, the adjoining coal-holes (small unlit rooms opening off the light wells) and the Dead House (a tunnel running under the courtyard of Somerset House, usually closed to the public). The recordings were made at twelve locations along the tidal length of the Thames, using hydrophone, ambient microphone, accelerometer,[6] shotgun microphone and video camera, and include Teddington Lock and Richmond Lock; historic steam turbines at Kew Bridge Steam Museum; a live feed of the Somerset House clock; Millennium Bridge; HMS Belfast; Tower Bridge; John Harrison's chronometers at the National Maritime Museum; the Thames Barrier; Southend Pier; and a bell buoy and whistle buoy in the Thames Estuary. Sounds of water, ticking and chiming are heard throughout the installation, sometimes accompanied by video projections in the coal-holes and Dead House. The sounds overlap to such an extent that they are sometimes heard in conjunction with their visual referent, though many other sounds are always present. The video projections include the wires of Millennium Bridge; water seen through the gap in Tower Bridge; pedestrians and vehicles passing on Tower Bridge; the Thames Estuary bell and whistle buoys and falling water at Teddington Lock.

River Sounding (detail of coal hole Tower Bridge) Bill Fontana 2010 Audiovisual installation, Somerset House Photograph by Claire Reddleman

Sounds can be symbolic when they are 'divorced from their geographic particulars and corporeal referents'[7] and then made to indicate an event that took place in the past, in the case of a recorded sound, or an event that we require technological mediation to hear in the artwork, in the case of live sounds. The sound of the whistle buoy was recorded on a specific day in February 2010[8] but when heard, it becomes the sound of the buoy; the sound that is being made always, the sound that one assumes is still being made months after River Sounding has closed. As heard, it stands for the entire idea of the buoy; or buoys; or the sea, without reference to any specificity of time of day, season or duration. Indeed, it would be pedantic to insist on such a specific degree of indexicality; sounds can therefore be understood to be representative. The moments that have been recorded stand for every moment that the buoy is sounding. In this way, the sound that happened at a particular time and place becomes generalised, and symbolic.

River Sounding (detail of coal hole Richmond Lock) Bill Fontana 2010 Audiovisual installation, Somerset House Photograph by Claire Reddleman

Sounds also function symbolically in other contexts; a siren is in fact an index of the mechanism that produces the sound, but its symbolic meaning is 'emergency'. This is a meaning agreed by convention, in the same way that language itself operates through the convention that particular sounds carry agreed meanings as speech. Speech itself is further symbolised as its supplementary form in writing. In the same way, River Sounding symbolises the sonic locations as sound recordings, which are supplemented with visual representations.

River Sounding (detail of coal hole Millennium Bridge) Bill Fontana 2010 Audiovisual installation, Somerset House Photograph by Claire Reddleman

In River Sounding the act of selection is manifested in the relationship between the sonic locations (reality) and the recordings of those locations (representation). Fontana has selected, as the cartographer does, certain features of reality and made representations of them: [T]he cartographer makes a selection, classifies, standardises; [the cartographer] undertakes intellectual and graphical simplifications and combinations; [the cartographer] emphasizes, enlarges, subdues or suppresses visual phenomena according to their significance to the map.[9] River Sounding can be understood as a map due to this process of selection and encoding. Fontana describes River Sounding as a form of "sonic mapping."[10] An additional definition of a map useful here would be as an attempt to understand, through representation and especially symbolisation, the perception and experience of place and spatial power relations. This characterisation would hold for cartographic representations in general. The significance of River Sounding is that it makes apparent this representational function through making them experiential rather than passive. In an ocularcentric[11] culture, visual representations are necessarily more passive and auditory representations, in their supplementary role, show up the hegemonic consent to receive the world in primarily visual forms.

River Sounding (detail of coal hole Whistle Buoy) Bill Fontana 2010 Audiovisual installation, Somerset House Photograph by Claire Reddleman

Therefore, there exists a 'signified,' to use Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic terminology, and a signifier; the map signifies the place. River Sounding indexes some of the sounds in the 'reality' by presenting them within the artwork. Further, it indexes some of reality's visual aspects by presenting video projections of them. Therefore, the resulting representations have an indexical relationship to the reality; despite the complex process that mediates the translation from reality to photographic image or sound recording, the equipment was present in the reality registering and encoding data about the 'real'.

River Sounding (detail, view into Dead House toward Tower Bridge projection) Bill Fontana 2010 Audiovisual installation, Somerset House Photograph by Claire Reddleman

Having established the operation of sound as symbolic in River Sounding, it is important to note the occlusions and collapses of symbolic sound. These work in tandem with the other selections inherent in making any symbol and any map. First, symbolic sound effects a geographical collapse between the places represented. The relation between sonic symbols in River Sounding is not geographical; they do not occupy distinct geographic space and their physical relationship is not equivalent to the geographical relationships between aural locations: The spatiality of [Fontana's] work occurs on two levels: by appropriating given locations and their sound events as geographic coordinates, and then relocating these beyond their respective cartographic fixity.[12]

River Sounding (detail, Dead House with Tower Bridge projection) Bill Fontana 2010 Audiovisual installation, Somerset House Photograph by Claire Reddleman

The cartographic representation thereby undermines the relationship between sound and 'source' and reinstates the experiential character of sound; that is, that sounds exist in spaces that are potentially much larger than the space within which the source can be viewed. Hearing is therefore posited as an equally valid mode of perception, which operates differently at a relational level.

Secondly, symbolic sound effects a temporal collapse between the time-specific recordings that appear simultaneously and overlap. As discussed, part of the symbolic function of the audio and visual recordings arises from the selected timeframe coming to stand for all times in the constructed environment. This process is the reverse of Wood's observation in relation to 'traditional' visual cartography, that what was whole becomes categorised and divided up into separate pieces in order to be depicted;[13] in River Sounding locations which could not ordinarily be heard together co-exist, and, having been selected, form a new, constructed and atemporal whole.[14]

Thirdly, symbolic sound effects a collapse of 'realism' and indexicality. Some of the sounds require privileged access, whether in terms of physical access such as the service tunnel of the Thames Barrier, or in terms of technological access to sounds that cannot be heard naturally, such as the accelerometer recordings. There is no sense in which one could 'use' this map cartographically to 'find' the aural locations outside the experience of River Sounding, despite the recordings having indexed the reality.

River Sounding (detail, Dead House with Millennium Bridge projection) Bill Fontana 2010 Audiovisual installation, Somerset House Photograph by Claire Reddleman

The result of these collapses is an enunciation of the collapses involved in selection in cartography in general. In this way, by showing what the 'text' of the place is, and what it is not, River Sounding can be deconstructive, not only of itself but of the wider field of cartography. The Derridean concept of the supplement is crucial here. Derrida theorises the supplement as an addition that points to a fundamental or 'originary' lack to which, [t]he supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence. It is thus that art, technè, image, representation, convention etc., come as supplements to nature.[15] The cartographic representation supplements nature by representing it. By offering sound as the primary mode of representation and the visual as its supplement there is an inversion of the norms of ocularcentric hegemony.

When situated in the broader field of cartography, River Sounding operates as a radical map, using a supplementary medium to demonstrate and expose the exclusions of traditional cartography. In this way, its effect is counter-hegemonic. The handout map is a supplement or part of the perimap[16] to the artwork and mediates the experience of it. Providing the listener-viewer with three supplementary maps, the handout map encourages a continuous translation between the 'real' of River Sounding and the symbolic representations of it on the handout. But in this case, the 'real' is already another order of the symbolic; the symbolic map refers to the symbolic soundscape. River Sounding thereby suggests an 'infinite regression' or 'hyperreal'[17] character of the reality arising from this exchange between the work and the supplementary map, and thereby in cartographic representation as a whole.

River Sounding (detail of coal hole Tower Bridge) Bill Fontana 2010 Audiovisual installation, Somerset House Photograph by Claire Reddleman

The notion of the cartographic representation's supplementarity is reinforced by this infinite regression. Derrida theorises supplementarity as an "indefinite process […] the supplement proposes itself as supplement of supplement, sign of sign".[18] The handout map supplements the artwork (which is also the cartographic representation), and the artwork supplements reality: "The sign is always the supplement of the thing itself."[19] R. M. Schafer identifies the need for "a reassertion of the importance, both socially and ultimately legally, of acoustic space as a different but equally important means of measurement" and Fontana himself observes "how ignored the acoustic sensibility is in our normal experience of the world."[20]

Cosgrove also advocates the "recognition that human cognitive and affective ties to the world do not operate solely through the sense of sight."[21] He also notes the theoretical roots of the 'distrust of vision' in feminisms and post-colonial theory, following the identification of dominant ways of seeing as phallocentric and colonialist: 'The gaze', as this mode of seeing and its related forms of representation were sometimes termed, is inescapably voyeuristic, domineering and exploitative; it demanded resistance.[22]

This is centrally important for a visual medium like cartography, which has been pressed into the use of (and in a large part was created by) the project of western colonial expansion. It may be this to which Fontana is referring when he wryly observes (frustratingly without explanation) that it would be possible for him to record "the sound of power."[23] River Sounding makes a response to this visual hegemony through its supplementarity. The notion of the supplementarity of River Sounding is useful, then, in thinking of cartographies as contrapuntal. Auditory experience and sonic symbolism here add a countering voice to the dominance of visual representation, asserting the importance of multiple modes of representation. This insistence on multiplicity is a turn away from a Gramscian conception of hegemony, whereby a counter-hegemony will overturn the existing, dominant hegemony, to a more plural conception that emphasises a multiplicity of voices.

[1] There is an interesting comparison with Má Vlast by Bedřich Smetana; a series of tone poems which follow a river's course to 'paint' a nationalistic portrait of Bavaria. However, while these two works portray a river in sound, Má Vlast is a sonic portrait whereas River Sounding is a sonic map, for reasons which will be outlined here.

[2] Robert Blackson in Fontana, 2010 [exhibition catalogue], p.23

[3] ibid. p.24

[4] ibid. p.49

[5] ibid. p.49

[6] "Like contact microphones, accelerometers are sensitive to the vibrations within objects. In River Sounding they have been used to listen in to and record the sounds hidden within architectural structures. Microphones measure pressure or velocity (rate of change of pressure in respect to time); accelerometers measure acceleration (rate of change of velocity with respect to time." Richard Whitelaw in Fontana, 2010 [exhibition catalogue], p.36

[7] Brandon LaBelle, 2006, p.231

[8] Fontana, 2010 [exhibition catalogue], p.40

[9] Denis Wood quoting Eduard Imhof, 1992, p.88

[10] Fontana, 2010 [exhibition catalogue], p.14

[11] This term is used in the sense that Georgia Warnke puts forward: "[T]he epistemological privileging of vision that begins at least as early as Plato's notion that ethical universals must be accessible to 'the mind's eye' and continues with the Renaissance, the invention of printing, and the development of the modern sciences." (Warnke, 1993, p.287)

[12] Brandon LaBelle, 2006, p.231

[13] Wood, 1992, p.79

[14] It is worth noting the well-established analogy between time and the flow of the river. Peter Ackroyd declares that "the Thames contains all times" (2007, p.14) and even that "it is history, the river of history, along which most of the significant English events of the last two thousand years have taken place; but it is also the river as history" (ibid., p.11).

[15] Jacques Derrida, 1997, pp.144-5. Emphasis in original.

[16] A complimentary concept for supplementarity is formulated by Wood and Fels as the 'paramap'. They adapt Gérard Genette's concept of paratext, and apply it to mapping, giving a paramap and epimap. The perimap includes all verbal and other sorts of production that are presented alongside the map, and the epimap involves the wider field of materials that relate to the map but are not presented with it. This concept emphasises the textuality of the cartographic representation in a way that speaks to Derrida's emphasis on an extended conception of text and language. Part of River Sounding's perimap, then, is appendix 4, the handout map, and part of its epimap is the promotional leaflet, appendix 5.

[17] "Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal." Jean Baudrillard, 1999, p.1

[18] Derrida, 1997 p.281

[19] ibid., p.145

[20] Fontana quoted by LaBelle, 2006, p.233

[21] Cosgrove, 2008, p.4

[22] ibid.

[23] Night Waves podcast, 2010