Echo & Narcissus

2023, AB Projects, Los Angeles, California, USA

Echo & Narcissus explores the creation of form through sound. Through her work, Stacy Jo Scott  continually probe the question of how to make what is ephemeral or virtual into something material. She seeks to illustrate the various entanglements between the virtual and the material. Her work explores digital space in a profoundly material way. She navigates between virtual processes and material forms to demonstrate that no actual boundary exists between them. As Allucquére Rosanne “Sandy” Stone states, “Forgetting about the body is an old Cartesian trick, one that has unpleasant consequences for those whose speech is silenced by the act of our forgetting”.

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Scott worked with Holly Newlands to create a custom program that translates 3D models into sound. For this process, a 3D model is loaded into the program. A sound is created as the user traces the contour of the model, and the sound changes depending on the distance from the edge of the contour to the central axis of the model. This process translates the contour of the sculpture into various sounds, resulting in a kind of music. As the 3D model spins in space like a record, the movement of one’s finger on the screen “plays” the model like a needle tracing the groove of a vinyl record. The program records the note that is played which she mapped onto a rhisograph printed circular grid which corresponds to the 88 notes of a piano, played at 60 beats per minute.