Notes on Sound and Wind
Take a deeper look into 'Somatosonic', an interdisciplinary art unit composed of Christina Dy, Marco Ortiga, and Tad Ermitaño.
Written by Tad Ermitaño
October 6, 2023
As the video says, we are Somatosonic, an interdisciplinary art unit composed of Christina Dy, Marco Ortiga, and myself, Tad Ermitaño. I make sound and video installations with electronics and computers. Christina (CD for short) draws, performs, and makes objects with an angular, geometric slant. Marco is a kinetic sculptor with a facility for building things in metal. The three of us do noise performance together. The unit’s rule is that any artwork released by Somatosonic has to have been made collaboratively by at least two of the members.
This is an extremely interesting way to work, and I would say the works we make manifest the energy of the collaboration: the excitement of seeing your idea added to and flowering in the mind and hands of another. However, the price of working as a unit is that we generally fall outside ways of thinking about art. Art is still generally thought of as the province of a single creative person, with the paradigmatic image of an artist generally resembling a painter or a writer. In spite of the existence of works authored by groups like collaborative muralists, rock bands, and improvisational theater troupes, the idea of art made by more than one person remains an alien idea, something which becomes painfully obvious to an art unit looking into residency opportunities. Because institutional offers of group residencies are near-nonexistent, we decided to organize an independent residency – i.e., to hang out together somewhere under the sponsorship of friends and relations). In this case, the friend was Patrick Reyes, a friend and collector of CD’s who owned a beach house.
We were very concerned that the residency not just be a vacation; that we would actually produce new work, or at least stabs at new work that could be refined later. I had been playing with wind harps (also called Aeolian harps, after Aeolus, the Greek god of the wind) during the pandemic and brought a few that I had built during the pandemic out of aluminum channels. Wind harps are (as the name implies) something like the string version of wind chimes, and produce the drones that track the video. I thought they might work well on a windy location like the beach.
As it turned out, the idea was something of a jackpot. Marco and CD loved the harps’ sound and it was immediately decided that we should build, plant, and document a set of ten standing in the water as a sound installation, the results of which are visible in the highlights video. This became the first of several projects we launched during the residency.
Another three projects grew out of Marco’s entirely random decision to fly a kite at the beach for fun. Feeling the string vibrate under my hand (and teeth – I often bite things when I suspect they might be hiding hidden sounds: your teeth can conduct vibrations to your ears) inspired the idea of sonifying the kite – i.e., finding a way to attach the string to some kind of pickup mechanism so that we could hear the kite. Marco and I invented one pickup mechanism each, which produced encouraging results. Something definitely to follow up. Another kite project were the tetrix kites that CD built. These are essentially tetrahedral versions of Sierpinski’s fractal. CD stumbled on the design while surfing the net, and decided to build one for fun out of drinking straws and plastic bags. This ‘for fun’ impulse birthed a 4-cell kite, which flew well enough to inspire a 16 cell kite, which flew excellently. The 64-cell unit collapsed under the wind, though. Lessons learned: drinking straws are not great kite building material and tetrix kites do not grow stronger as they grow larger, the way geodesic domes are supposed to do. We eventually tied its remains to a stick and flew it against the setting sun as a kind of rueful memorial to the ambition.
I posted a picture of me biting the kite string on FB, which led to friends reminding us that local kites, or guryon, were often equipped with bow-shaped buzzers called sumba. This information led us to an instructional by SIRChardTv Vlogs on YouTube. Marco (the handy one) immediately whipped up ten and planted them in the sand for our second sound installation. Marco whipping the sumba around led to the idea of CD designing a dance/combat piece, incorporating dancer-made sound with sumba in the place of arnis sticks. Maybe talk to CD’s friends in capoeira about a possible jam, tracked by music by Somatosonic.
Tracking CD dancing with a light stick against the setting sun was done with a computer program I wrote in Processing. We’ll be putting a bunch of them on a thumbdrive to give to our host as a thank you.
By any light, the residency must be judged a howling success. It turns out that the impetus that led to forming Somatosonic in the first place – the chemistry that facilitated building on and improving on each others’ ideas in conversation – acquires momentum when the three of us are placed in close quarters for an extended period. The momentum was definitely amplified by CD, who is something of the group’s goad and planner. She is usually the one who asks what the group should do tomorrow.
I also want to note that the project’s success was also due to the fact that the beach was VERY WINDY. Almost everything we did was inspired by or interacted with the wind. It would be entirely appropriate even to call it our wind residency. Somatosonic likes to build machines so I’m thinking that a place with literal, free-floating, environmental energy really energized us. However, I’m also thinking that this notion might be abstracted and generalized for other residencies – that they are best planned in places with or near some sort of feature or characteristic that could fire the artists’ energies.
Somatosonic would like to thank Mr. Patrick Reyes for his unfailing hospitality, for the dinner conversations, and for introducing the unit to feijoada.
