The beginnings of the piece came when the artists found a book of facsimiles of musical treatise incorporating images of hands used for musical notation. It became apparent that circa 1000 AD there was a great desire to visualise sound and transpose Greek musical philosophy into Christian thought . Access to this information was reserved to members of the church including the monk Guido Arezzo.

Even more interesting to the artists was the fact that the hurdy gurdy was also invented at this time as a tool to demonstrate the mathematical principals of sound using wooden wheel, strings and keys.

The installation evoked the activity of the scribes by allowing users to move a quill across a vellum of the drum skin, triggering a sequence of sounds derived from medieval musical scales and Wishart's composition in the space. The six notes of Guido's scale were heard as hurdy gurdy drones, each assigned to one of six speakers. Intermittent drones wove consonant and dissonant chords from spatially distinct positions in the gallery.

As each drone sounded in the space, points were illuminated on a computer image of Guido's musical hand superimposed a schematic of the space.

Grounds further noticed the correspondence between medieval calligraphy and Sydney graffiti tagging. Thus, a "bomber" was invited and contributed to the installation with a physicality of gestures inscribed on the wall.

As a live performance, UT's primary motive is to juxtapose three spaces: the medieval, the contemporary and the virtual.
This requires "playing the space" so that sequences of deep base drones or beats are triggered whilst improvising movement and song fragments.
Future manifestations of the work will involve the creation of the third space in the form of a website. This will introduce and document the work in situ, and will provide additional information about its contents. A window into cyber-space, a matrix of the medieval and contemporary which is non-linear, displaces chronolgy and is an individual rather than a public space.

"In some profound way, cyberspace is another place. Unleashed into the Internet, my 'location' can no longer be fixed purely in physical space. Just 'where' I am when I enter cyberspace is a question yet to be answered, but clearly my position cannot be pinned down to a mathematical location in Euclidean or relativistic space - not with any number of hyperspace extensions! As with the medievals, we in the technologically charged West on the eve of the twenty-first century, increasingly contend with a two-phase reality."
Margaret Werthheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace

Future manifestations of the work may involve the third space on the web which would be projected into the installation as a feedback loop. Alternative methods are in development to remote trigger aspects of the installation in live performance and generate interactivity for sounds, images, objects and projections.

introduction : spatial demonstration : more information : sounds and images