Gleb Glonti is a Russian artist and curator. In his work, Glonti explores sound environments and sounds that occur in the environments.
For the exhibition
Geometry of Now, Glonti presented a large site-specific installation in the basement level of GES-2, using the principle of "cocktail party effect" – our ability to focus on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of others.
Gleb Glonti:
I chose the basement under the XIX century power plant [100 square meters chamber with 7 meters high ceiling] to set up a site-specific installation.
Considering that during the exhibition this place is full of sound, produced by other installations and visitors, you may fight it or deal with it. I chose not to fight, so I didn't use any of amplifiers to overlay the sound picture, forcing my sounds above the others. I created an environment where everything had their place.
I used 4 professional fans to create a noise layer, so when people entered the room, what they heard was mostly noise. Also, it was extremely
dark in the room, I left just tiny red lights that defined the straight path, let visitors explore the rest of the room themselves. Thus, when visitors entered the room, they need to keep still for 5-7 minutes so the eyes could start to distinguish the objects in the darkness. During the same time, ears are adapting to the noise level, so this level becomes a new normal to the ears and they starting to distinguish sound objects behind the noise. They come up as uncontrollable stochastic events, generating always unique sound picture. So, using found sound objects and psychoacoustic features, I got the result.