For their joint research project terratones.fm, the artists Dominique Koch (visual arts) and Tobias Koch (musician and composer ) elaborated an experimental glass blowing method to “fossilize” the traces left by the movement of sound-waves into a physical object.
The air pressure generated by the physical force of sound-waves was channeled and used to blow the molten glass. Sound thus determined the shape and form of the sculptural objects, a mutation of the sonic, or what is heard, creating fossilized vestiges. Opaque sand becomes translucent material in this process, a poetics of clarity rendered from what is usually unheard.
The Sound Fossils are part of a wider research by the artists into sonic ecologies and our relationship to the biological world. Listening does not solely have an auditory function and can serve as a more comprehensive attunement with the world. Through hearing sonic ecologies, expanding practices of listening, and experiments with attunement to the polyphony of the earth, we can consider the fundamental problematics of human exceptionalism and the entrenched detachment from the natural world in today’s changing climate and collapse.
In an additional attempt, glass plates sprinkled with sand dust were subjected to sonic vibration, revealing resonance patterns in the form of organic shapes. These patterns left by the glass dust were then burnt into the plates, fossilizing and rendering these sonic traces into a physical object.
