September 18 – October 21, 2010
BOX Stairwell

Sounds for Stairs – Lina Dib

Houston soundscapes animate the main staircase of Box13 for this interactive exhibit. Making the mundane whimsical and otherworldly, Dib’s installation defamiliarizes, and recontextualizes sounds to create a dynamic sonic postcard, orchestrated by the up and down movements of the visitors. The staircase turns the world inside out by bringing into the quiet gallery space reverberations, swishes and clatters that usually dwell outside. Blurring the boundaries between the constructed environment and nature, this intervention makes architecture pliable and responsive. Through interactions, the soundscapes are reassembled, but never repeated. When someone lingers on the steps, so do the sounds; and when visitors climb up and down, the sounds coalesce, with a few surprises along the way.

Lina Dib is a Phd candidate in Anthropology at Rice University. Her work focuses on concepts of time and memory in the design of digital recording devices. Dib’s compositions range from the ethnographic to the experimental and have been shown in Montreal, New York and Houston.

Programming by Navid Navab and JS Rousseau.

Navab is a Montreal based composer, interaction and sound designer. He studied Electroacoustics and Computational Arts at Concordia University as well as Music Technology at McGill University. Currently he is active as a sound designer and researcher at Topological Media Lab, Matralab, and IRCAM.

Rousseau is an artist-designer-programmer in the field of new media. He holds a degree in Computation Arts from Concordia University. Recently, he has been working at the Topological Media Lab, ESKI Studio and the Society for Arts and Technologies, as a researcher, affiliate programmer and designer.