Standing at the base of the grand staircase in the Rotunda of City Hall, one will immediately hear the echo of birds chirping, warbling, and wings fluttering in different directions.  Upon this, a category of horns and bells – belonging to cable cars, fog horns, buoys, and nearby elevators – clang and ring about the vast space below the fifth largest dome in the world. Once in a while, the whisper of water lapping against an invisible surface or the strains of garbled speech drifts past.

Spiraling Echoes, a sound sculpture by internationally renown and San Francisco-based artist Bill Fontana, uses echolocation by transmitting recordings of historic and contemporary San Francisco through moving speakers hidden inside the Rotunda dome.  The moving speakers transmit the recordings as ultrasonic beams, which will float down four floors, bouncing off the ornate architectural surfaces along the way. Visitors will experience different compositions of sounds as they move throughout the Rotunda and increasing volume levels as they ascend each floor.   Often times, I found myself whipping around to “see” the noise behind me, cocking my head in one direction to hear the noise to the left, or tilting backwards to find the sound falling from above.  I watched others walking through the main hall looking in various directions to find the source of the sound.  After listening for some time, one can almost see the contact points of one sound bouncing off a surface of the circular colonnade to bas-relief panel of heads and animals.

Fontana has written of “the idea of being able to hear as far as you could normally see” in relation to some of his sound artworks.  This is an interesting concept in relation to Spiraling Echoes as one might not be able to hear the conversation taking place between the two security guards down below, but upon hearing the garbled voices of protestors or birds chirping, one finds oneself scanning the far off Beau-Arts nooks and crannies of the walls to see if they were really talking or whether parrots, seagulls, or avocets were tucked away in between the multitude of balustrades and pilasters. Sound art, sculpture, or installations emphasizes environment as much as any visual form of art.  Scale plays a large factor, as well.  Volume, in amplification or reduction, can equate to the close up of a photographic lens.

Fontana creates an interesting experience of bringing the outdoors inside.  Moreover, the subtle quality of these selected recordings and use of echolocation allows for space in between or alongside these sounds for other environmental noises.  The sounds of Cantonese spoken by tourists, cameras clicking, bits of conversation by municipal employees, and clacking of high heeled shoes interwoven with this “range of sounds from music to spoken word to wildlife” indeed fulfills goals of Fontana’s generation of sound artists.  Fontana, along with Maryanne Amacher, Bernhard Leitner, and Max Neuhaus, sought to incorporate the environment of their installations and performances into their work.  Rather than creating what may sound like a bird conservatory at times, Spiraling Echoes goes further to represent the sounds of San Francisco by interacting with the sounds, human bodies, and architecture within City Hall.

Aside from drawing upon historic and contemporary recordings of San Francisco, another element of time and duration differentiates and also allies Fontana’s work to the typical public art commission.  Fontana has written, “Sounds that repeat, that are continuous and that have long duration defy the natural acoustic mortality of becoming silent.”  The use of echo and delay extends a sound’s time duration, perhaps demonstrating an aspiration towards stopping time altogether and/or allaying death through silence.  In an interview, the pioneering architect and sound artist, Bernhard Leitner referenced the Taj Mahal’s huge empty domed space above the crypt, which is similar in size to the domed rotunda of City Hall; however, the dome of Taj Mahal also has an extremely hard and polished surface of marble and can sustain a tone for up to 28 seconds.  A simple melody will interweave with itself, going on and on to become an almost timeless sound.  The room never ends.  Space and time are not collapsed but made seemingly infinite.  Again, Fontana and the first generation of sound artists sought the elimination of time, which is different from but also similar to the purpose of monuments – the antiquated form of public art commissions.  Monuments also seek to defy time, but by standing firmly still within it. 

But all of these sounds, “riding the cable car from downtown to the wharf, then feeding seagulls at Aquatic Park while the fog rolls in,” are almost deceptively idyllic soundscapes of San Francisco.  It seems to be a picturesque sound-equivalent of a San Francisco post card. Therefore, it was appropriate to be sharing this space with tourists posing and taking photos the grand staircase.  Of course, there’s something to be said about translocation - bringing the outdoors inside and expanding space and time.  But what about the site and meaning of the site, other than as a symbolic façade of fortitude or timeless representative of city government?  Fontana has presented works that seemed more thought-provoking, in terms of loaded sites, in the past.  In 1984, Fontana transmitted sounds of an active train station in Cologne through buried loudspeakers in a field near the Berlin Wall, the former site of a railway station, for Distant Trains.  In what seems to be a similar project relating to a site of civic pride, Fontana displaced live sounds sources from various parts of the city of Cologne (a zoo, the Rhine River, a church, and a pedestrian street) and put them all in a 16 speaker installation in the Rohncalliplatz, a square next to the Kölner Dome cathedral (Metropolis Köln, 1985).

It is understood that Spiraling Echoes has a dynamic character in that is also interacts with the passing bodies and regular inhabitants of City Hall, by bouncing these recordings off them and each other, thereby activating the space further.  But, for that very reason, could the chosen recordings have been selected with other significance that relates to issues contradicting civic pride?  Not every work of public art must be confrontational or even directly relate to issues of social or environmental justice – and rarely is it ever that way with state-commissioned work. Perhaps it is best left to enjoy Spiraling Echoes for its uniqueness as public sound art, its scale, and its more esoteric intentions.

- Michelle Y. Hyun


IMAGE CREDITS:

Rotunda 1o3 Montage, 2009. 
Courtesy of the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Fontana Montage 1, 2009. 
Courtesy of the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Rotunda at San Francisco City Hall, 2009. 
Courtesy of the San Francisco Arts Commission.