The prolific audio-visual artist is in the middle of his most ambitious and large-scale project to date. As part of Melbourne Fringe, Fox has rigged a laser and sound installation that practically takes over the CBD. For four nights over the festival sixteen lasers will be beamed off the IBM tower in Southbank, hitting different points across the city, accompanied by a piece of music, also composed by Fox. The music will be played at listening stations across the city and is available for download online.
It’s a mammoth project and one that’s evolved over time. “It’s exciting, adrenalising, terrifying – all of those things together,” Fox says. “If it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work on a massive scale. There’s so much risk. But I’ve always thought life is nothing without risk, without something on the line.”
The project has also involved a good bit of trial, error and reflection on the nature of individual experience. “We were testing these lasers and looking at them in the sky, and from some points they looked amazing but from some they just didn’t work,” Fox explains. “It’s all about perspective, and the way you look at things, and I thought – well rather than see that as a bad thing, why not make that a feature. You can walk around and experience it in 100 different ways. But it’s not the lasers changing, it’s kind of your biology. If you’re standing under a street light, your pupils contract and you won’t see the laser very well at all. But as soon as you step out of that light, everything comes into relief. The light in the sky doesn’t change, it’s how you perceive it, and I really like that subjectivity.”
As he began to create the accompanying audio piece with the lights, Fox found parallels in the light and sound technologies he was using. “For Sky Light I’ve written a piece of music entirely on a particular module of synthesiser called a Bucla, which has the capacity to split a sound into its odd and even harmonics,” he notes. “You take a sound and you split it into two halves, almost. I really liked that visually the piece is about connecting all these geographical points, with the lasers beaming to different city buildings across the river, and it encourages you to look up. It draws attention to the topography of the city in a way. Then the way these synthesisers work is that you won’t get any sound out of them until you connect two points with a cable – so it’s quite poetically connected to the visuals.”
BY MATILDA EDWARDS
Venue: Melbourne CBD
Dates: September 15 – September 18
Time: Dusk – 11pm
Tickets: Free
