ubiquitous

UBIQUITOUS: an installation by phill harding, south square gallery, thornton, uk, august 2005

a review:

It took me a while to work it out, but what isn't said or heard or even suggested in Phill Harding's Ubiquitous sound installation is any idea of aeroplanes flying into buildings. Ubiquitous makes the point that we have become so accustomed to planes overhead that we don't notice them, unless it's a couple of RAF flyboys rehearsing what they would do if they met a black rucksack 100 feet above the Yorkshire moors, or two passenger planes flying into two tall buildings, over and over on television.

Whether the omission of plane disasters is deliberate or not is a question unanswered at Ubiquitous, and it may not even have been in the thoughts of Phill Harding, who created the installation. Maybe it's just me doing some blue sky thinking, as many of us do these days. Certainly there's disagreement with the subject of Ubiquitous in the visitors book, with a Mr Angry Green pouring fashionable kneejerk scorn on the waste of resources and damage to the environment involved in flying to exotic sun-kissed destinations.

By their remarks many other visitors have obviously fallen for the close listening that Ubiquitous puts us through in the darkened room, where everyday and workaday sounds resonate side-by-side with the gradually rising and falling whisper-to-boom-and-back of planes approaching our point on the planet and then going away.

One key point is that the sounds are very clear, and it became impossible to tell whether what we were hearing was filtering in from the outside world or being played on the the five recordings of different lengths overlapping into infinite combinations. This didn't spoil the experience, on the contrary it made our ears and brains work harder.

This close listening had a major effect when we left the room. One thing John Peel did for is was to make us listen more carefully to all the music we heard, to 'open our ears', partly by programming highly contrasting types of music next to each other to hold us back from stereotypical judgements. Ubiquitous also has an same ear-opening effect - on leaving the listening room I was immediately conscious of every trivial sound - sounds that had been background became foreground, in a very musical way that only happens in times of delirium or panic.

The dimly-lit listening room is accompanied by a bright room covered with (almost) postcard photos of sky - some feature vapour trails or a plane, almost a dot until you look closer and see the sun glinting off the tiny fuselage far above the camera. The photo exhibition is explained as an almost-random point of the camera towards the noise whenever a plane flew overhead. Whatever, it looks stunning, with blue skies frilled with varieties of cloud, and some all-grey shots.

The blocks of brightly lit photos sit in one room in silence, and the sounds fill the other, darkened room. An idealistic thought suggests the two should be united, but then neither would be experienced in such clarity - our senses would choose whether to foreground the sound or the picture, and one would predominate, probably the visuals. The separation of the two makes us examine the evidence more closely, and experience it with more clarity, as does the whole Ubiquitous installation.

Rob Walsh

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• soundscape
• sound art
• installation art