Artist: Bill Fontana
Title: Sonic Dreamscapes, 2018
Medium: Sound and video
Location: SoundScape Park
Sonic Dreamscapes presents a sound and video installation created for both daytime and evening viewing via SoundScape Park’s sophisticated 72-channel Meyer sound and projection systems. “It is the perfect instrument to create sound choreography inspired by the marine and natural environments of South Florida,” says Fontana. “These accompanying videos will be of an abstract nature and will explore the idea of an image that a sound makes and the sound that an image makes, which I call ‘Acoustic Visions.’”
The installation cycle begins during the day with individually recurring auditory recordings answering each other from different spatial points in SoundScape Park. By afternoon, the “musical vocabulary” will grow as additional sounds are added to the repertoire. As the evening approaches, environmentally inspired abstract videos will emerge on the video wall, allowing visitors to experience a myriad of floating sounds and meditative images.
Sonic Dreamscapes is the inaugural piece in a yearlong initiative by the City of Miami Beach Art in Public Places program, which will be introducing permanent site-specific works of public art by internationally recognized artists throughout the newly renovated and expanded Miami Beach Convention Center area.
“Bill Fontana’s Sonic Dreamscapes exemplifies Miami Beach’s commitment to commissioning world-class public art. This work will enhance Miami Beach’s public art landscape, home to an already outstanding collection of Art in Public Places projects, including permanent work by Dan Graham, Roy Lichtenstein and Tobias Rehberger, among others,” says Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber.
Sonic Dreamscapes is the culmination of intensive research and a lengthy series of field recordings. Two years of exploration, supported by Art in Public Places and the New World Symphony, has yielded multiple versions of the artwork, allowing visitors at SoundScape Park a different experience with each visit. Trained as a composer, this work marks Fontana’s first collaboration on a public commission with a music institution. Sonic Dreamscapes is Fontana’s third major public art commission in the United States, following Soaring Echoes for the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park and Acoustical Visions for the Golden Gate Bridge’s 75th anniversary in San Francisco. His works abroad have been publicly installed at the Tate Britain and Tate Modern, The Venice Biennale and MAXXI in Rome.