“Immersion 3”
Loren Chasse, Martine Corompt, Rosemary Dean, Jim Haynes, Philip Samartzis and Jennifer Sochackyj
17 Sept → 2 Oct 2004

Immersion 3 is one in a series of events curated by sound artist and academic Philip Samartzis focused on the theory and practice of surround sound and immersive environments.

Immersion 3 researched the difficulties associated with sound presentations in gallery spaces in order to develop concepts and strategies that enable multiple artists using sound to simultaneously exhibit without negatively affecting one another. In order to investigate this objective, the three adjoining galleries that comprise West Space each contain an installation in which sound plays a pivotal role. A special multi-speaker matrix was installed throughout the gallery space to coordinate and distribute the sound design of each installation, converting West Space into one giant sound resonator. In this way each sound design can be strategically placed anywhere in the gallery space, and mixed to minimise polyglotic incoherence.

By its very nature, the installation was a reconfiguration of acoustic and architectural space that enables incongruent relationships between sound and space to develop within a discourse that modulates between a series of diegetic and non-diegetic, intentional and random exchanges. It is the influence of acoustic and architectural space upon that which is expressed that is one of the most attractive features of the installation. Also, the manner in which audiences navigate and interact with installation work was significantly different to the way they engage with sound work in other spheres of presentation in which elements such as form and time are highly regulated. The reduction of navigational intervention enables a total reconfiguration of the temporal and spatial aspects of compositional practice that is rarely found anywhere but the province of the art gallery.

In 1999 the inaugural Immersion used the cinematic space as a site of performance to explore the potential of Dolby Digital surround sound to render and modulate sophisticated sound fields.

In 2001, Immersion focused on the concert hall and the ability of a multiple speaker surround sound diffusion system to comprehensively choreograph acoustic and architectural space through live spatialisation.

Featuring Loren Chasse, Martine Corompt, Rosemary Dean, Jim Haynes, and Jennifer Sochackyj.