1975venice - saet

Along with artists involved in the Light and Space Movement in California in the 1960’s, Michael Brewster became interested in exploring the boundaries of phenomenological experience as a means of providing the viewer with a cognitive awareness of how the process of our perceptions conditions our imaginations and our understandings of an art work. Using sound to create a perceptual field as opposed to an object also established a kind of secondary, imaginary visual experience as well as the primary aural one. Instead of walking around a sculptural object, the experience of Brewster’s work requires us to move through the sound as a sculptural material, one that allows us to explore it from within. His work establishes a unique dynamic between viewer and artwork. (Michael Brewster, http://acousticsculpture.com/catalog.pdf )

An essay about sound as sculpture – 1998 — You can't make sound become hard and solid; but you can make it seem to stand still, as if hovering in place, so that you can walk around inside its acoustic structures. Sustained sound in a room with good echo can appear to us as an archipelago of audial sensations of space. Standing still, sound is a dimensional substance you can move through without hitting your head on any thing. Its a real good material for sculpture. Sound has properties beyond its considerable powers of evocation that are actual spacial physical things we can feel and locate with our ears, sometimes with our bodies. Sound has physical size, actual dimensions in feet or meters, as well as density, vibrancy, rhythms and textures. Walking through it in its resonant state provides an experience similar to perusing a landscape but from the inside, with all of your body instead of from the outside with just your eyes. It shows us the "near field". Like a solid it has volumes, edges, planes, fullnesses, flatnesses, roundnesses, and hollows: the works. It comes "fully equipped" to elaborate our experience sculpturally. (Michael Brewster) — [read more]