Seventeen Unsung Songs
A major solo installation for Second Life by Adam Nash (Adam Ramona) presented by the Odyssey Art Simulator, curated by Sugar Seville. Shortlisted for the National Art Award in New Media, at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art.
One monumental immersive, interactive columnunar audiovisual sculpture, accompanied by sixteen smaller, intimate immersive audiovisual interactives. This was a major show of post-convergent interactive audiovisual 3D art.
Press launch September 1, 2007, public launch September 8, 2007. Closed February 2009.
Adam Ramona (Adam Nash) - Seventeen Unsung Songs
by Dr. Lisa Dethridge (Lisa Dapto)
Nash’s exhibition at Odyssey Island in Second Life - Seventeen Unsung Songs – reveals the artist’s mature focus and discipline in a complex audio/visual sculptural form he has helped to pioneer.
These fascinating kinetic devices invite us to linger and play while probing the role of the avatar within the complex 3D space.
Each Unsong Song is like the product of an ethereal instrument, fresh from another planet where synaesthesia is the dominant mode.
Pieces like Carillon and Rarer Air are instruments the avatar “plays” to trigger complex feedback. In Carillon (a 3D version of one of Nash’s 2D Pretty Noise Toys), a ball roams randomly around a 3D maze of tropical and dayglo candy colours. When it hits a cube, we hear sounds friendly and pastoral, like a cowbell.
In Disaccumulator, the avatar can delete and reconfigure shapes and sounds as red gravity balls bounce downward from a mysteriously suspended platform, hitting on red planks or tines which “clang” and “bong” sonorously as the avatar touches the work.
As in all of the Unsung Songs, aural and architectural forms collide in a funky conglomerate of random and rhythmical elements.
Each is an experiment in visual and sonic polyphony where the avatar is both audience and co-creator of the unearthly forms and music that float in the domain.
In mouselook, the avatar becomes one with the sculpture (or the Unsung Song) and the perspective shifts toward unitary experience where the rules of perspective and time are in constant evolution. In Crescent, the avatar looks up to see a pattern of loops extending into infinity. Sound goes in and out of phase like a musical round, as one strand continues to be joined by others. Both the visual and the audio strands eventually chime together in a satisfying pattern that suddenly “fits” and feels familiar but only for a moment, before they break apart and recycle.
The music is as pristine and ethereal as the graphics. Like most of the Unsung songs, the sounds of Cloud Chamber are deeply comforting, almost meditational, making it easy to rest in the space. Based on a fundamental tone of 77Hz, the intervals proceed in ratios of seven, one of the artist’s favorite numbers.
One enters the “courtyard” of The Space Between that is defined by a transparent net. The avatar unwittingly generates entire cubic structures as s/he moves. Shapes grow, flicker and evolve; they accrete around the avatar like the incarnation of virtual kinetic energy; markers of the avatar’s path. Audio and image work in synergy to visually track each movement in this Space Between realities. As in the other Unsung Songs, sound is generated alongside the visual shifts creating a highly responsive and enriched avatar environment.
Nash admits the influence of Yves Klein in the generation of this work. The avatar generates the blue forms through physical movement in a way reminiscent of Klein’s pop “happenings” of the 1960s in which female collaborators rolled their paint-daubed, bikini-clad bodies across the canvas turning it “Yves Klein blue”.
Nash’s love of blue is evident in Ultramarine Column which is a playground for avatars to fly in, through and around, catching bits of “sonic bling” as they do so.
The columns sway and ooze particles for joy or shrink and pine desperately when rejected. They communicate directly, challenging each owner/lover/user to prove their love and loyalty. In this giggly theatre of cruelty, the Avatar may choose to support and “love”, to ignore or even to abuse the artificial life form that is now virtually “theirs.”
Nash’s work both challenges and soothes the avatar, generating sounds and images of complexity through the interaction of simple patterns. He refers us to the paradoxes and beauties of the Avatar’s world, celebrating the freedoms; the wonders and anxieties in common to both real and virtual entities and habitats.
Details of Nash’s work are available on his website at http://yamanakanash.net