Creative Capital

It’s late at night. Your neighbors are in their backyard launching fireworks and aiming rifles in the air, taking the occasional potshot that already woke up every dog in the vicinity. Time to call the police and lodge a noise complaint, right? Sure—unless you’re sound artist Stephen Vitiello, who’s already scrambling to gather up all the appropriate gear to record this surreal canine fiesta. Vitiello relies heavily on his surrounding environment to present him with naturally occurring situations of sonic interest. These moments don’t always fall into his lap so easily. For his Creative Capital-supported project, Dogs in the Yard, Birds Overhead, the artist combs his current residence, the state of Virginia, in search of evocative soundscapes. His quest takes him everywhere from a NASCAR racetrack to an ancient, undisturbed forest.

The resulting sonic tableaux will manifest in two forums: a series of six-channel sculptural sound installations custom-designed for each gallery venue, and a stereo audio CD, tentatively titled What’s up with all the butterflies? The artist has already begun to present this new body of work, formatted in surround sound environments for Night Chatter, his 2006 solo exhibition at Museum 52, a London gallery. The same source material also crept into Untitled 1, a collaboration with artist Julie Mehretu that premiered at the 2006 Sydney Biennial, and into a 40-minute sound piece called Nottoway River to Cypress Bridge, part of a 2006 solo show at The Project in New York City.

These installations reflect Vitiello’s interest in the spatial qualities of sound as it physically interacts with architecture to define new forms and atmospheres. While the wall-mounted speaker arrays take on a sculptural presence, it’s the sounds emanating from them that fundamentally inform the viewer’s experience. Encountering one of Vitiello’s installations is like entering an alternate reality that temporarily heightens our senses and converts our physiology.

Known for his haunting recordings made in Tower One of the World Trade Center as it creaked and swayed in the strong winds on the day following Hurricane Floyd’s arrival in Manhattan, Vitiello has an extensive background in music. He played guitar in various punk bands during the 1970s and ‘80s. Now, he’s considered one of the preeminent creators in the field of sound art, and his work has been presented in solo exhibitions in New York, London, Paris, and Los Angeles. He has performed at institutions such as the Tate Modern, and curated shows for MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon.

A longtime city dweller, Vitiello now has Mother Nature right outside his doorstep. Since relocating to Virginia, his work has transitioned into something more organic and less mediated by conceptual strategies. This new direction sounds pristine, like most of his past projects, yet feels undomesticated, as if it were bucking the rigid grid-system of urban planning in favor of the unpredictability of the wilderness. Under the camouflage of darkness, he disappears into the night with his portable equipment, remaining in seclusion for hours in hopes that his surroundings will begin to whisper their nocturnal secrets directly into his binaural microphone. When your recording studio has no walls and often requires the cooperation of the National Parks Service, something banal can turn extraordinary in a heartbeat.

Like most musicians, Vitiello also sequesters himself in a more traditional studio environment to finesse his raw recordings. While some works receive only minimal processing, Vitiello often inserts his own compositional voice into his field recordings. For Dogs in the Yard, Birds Overhead, he favors treatments incorporating older analog gear rather than digital technology. The results are larger-than-life aural vistas where crickets and synthesizers coalesce, and cicadas sound like a haunted melody. Although these sorts of electronic treatments are a contradiction, the final outcome sounds inherently natural.