[For years Stephen Vitiello has focused on sounds that might be
called ambient, environmental or incidental. His work has
combined field recordings with digital processing to create
slowly evolving, sonically-rich soundscapes. For example, the
first track on his CD Light of Falling Cars is composed from
manipulated sounds of a paper cutter. In other works, Vitiello
has sought to reveal sounds that, in a given space, are ambient
or inaudible, sounds that might exist just beyond the reach of
the listener. One example is his 1999 installation atop the
World Trade Center, in which he placed contact microphones
against the glass windows of a 91st-floor office to amplify
exterior noises that were otherwise unheard but implied by the
view. Vitiello's intention was to increase the phenomenological
experience of the space while bringing the visitor to an
increased awareness of the building's height and movement as it
was affected by wind and other natural and non-natural forces.

When Dia commissioned Vitiello to participate in its series of
artists' projects for the web, he looked to the internet as a
source and found himself thinking about non-musical sound
archives. He soon zeroed in on physical, mostly natural sounds,
which he then organized in accordance with the four elements:
earth, air, wind, and fire. The resulting work serves as an
interactive guide to these sometimes hard-to-find archives. Each
site is represented by an audio sample that visitors can turn on
or off by clicking as they draw on up to seventeen simultaneous
tracks to devise a mix that might include a fruit fly courtship,
an underwater volcano, poison frogs, and extracts from the fiery
sounds of the Saturn 5 lift-off.

In addition, Vitiello created four new sound pieces generated in
part from his collection of found web-based sounds. These
compositions can be heard by clicking on icons taken from a
Western representation of a Tibetan Stupa. In this cosmology,
the elements are ordered from the bottom as Earth, Water, Fire,
and Air, with Ether as the fifth element. When a fifth element
was included by ancient and medieval civilizations, it was
usually described as space and often had a metaphysical
dimension. In the nineteenth century, it was widely accepted in
physics that a "luminiferous ether" existed-a theoretical,
transparent, weightless, undetectable, and universal substance
believed to act as the medium for transmission of
electromagnetic waves. While this idea was ultimately disproved
by Einstein's theory of relativity, it gave rise to the name
"Ethernet," the standard for data transmission used by most
networks, including the Internet. Bob Metcalfe, its accredited
founder, explained "Ethernet was named, on May 22, 1973, for the
luminiferous ether…an omnipresent passive medium of the
propagation of electromagnetic waves, in our case, Internet
packets."

Vitiello named his project after the ancient Western notion of
four elements. The term Tetrasomia refers to the Doctrine of
Four Elements written by Empedocles, the fifth-century BC
philosopher, who first postulated that all matter is comprised
of four "roots," or basic elements. A contemporary notion of
"the fifth element" is also present in Tetrasomia: its content
and context exist in the ether(net).]

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Sara Tucker: The sites you chose for this project range from individual
hobbyists' personal sound collections to a database containing 25,000
species of orthopteroid insects. How did you select the sites and what
drew you to these kinds of sounds? Why did you decide to exclude the
fifth element as a category for organizing sounds?

Stephen Vitiello: Over the last year or so when I have mentioned to
friends or colleagues that I was looking for specific sounds for
projects, they would often point me towards the Internet. My expectation
was that these sounds would be hard- to-find and low quality. However,
recently, when I was working on an installation and wanted sounds of
bats my wife, Tracy Leipold, quickly called up several sites with high-
quality, diverse recordings of bats from around the world. Michael
Lavin, at the Guggenheim Museum, also pointed out sites that feature
beautiful, ethereal ground-based ELF-VLF recordings. I started to make
lists of sounds that I would like to find, from close-ups of butterfly
wings and other flying insects to events like falling rocks and
earthquakes. I would then search online to see what I could track down.
I was amazed to learn how much is out there and how varied the sites
are: postings by amateur bird watchers; documentation by scientists;
archives for children to examine various things that make a crackling
sound; a religiously-inspired site that collects recordings of thunder;
commercial sites that sell sounds as well as non-commercial sites
generally sharing more arcane sounds for others to use freely.

For this project I was interested in finding a variety of evocative and
well-recorded sounds. At the same time, I wanted to create a reading
list of sorts – links for further listening. I was interested in
presenting sites that could introduce the visitor to the web as a sound
space, in much the way it has already become a resource for image, text
and popular music. Some archives are very personal, perhaps obsessive
collections of sounds that few beyond the site host might find
interesting. In other cases, they may appeal to larger audiences.
Several, including sites with archives of Big Foot or UFO audio
recordings, offer instructions on recording technique, suggested
equipment, and the locations where one might capture similar sounds.

Several times while working on this project I gave thought to whether to
include ether. One idea was to fill it with so-called impossible or
improbable nature, such as the Big Foot recordings, perhaps a nature
that we imagine rather than one we can be sure exists. Another idea was
to put links to other artists' sound projects. I don't have a conclusive
answer but I do feel that the presence of natural sounds, supported and
kept alive in this non-natural environment suggests an interesting
mystery. Where it might be argued that this network and transfer system
for information is not at all unearthly, I believe that it exists and
continually expands like a universe, in a way that starts to take on its
own character and personality.

ST:You were part of the collaboration responsible for Dia's first artist
project for the web in 1995, Fantastic Prayers. Five years later, how is
it different to be working in this medium again?

SV:Few people I knew at that time had adequate access to the web. Far
fewer had the proper set up to receive sound or video files. I was told
by everyone to keep the sound files very short, highly compressed and at
the lowest resolution to conserve bandwidth. I thought of the sound for
that site as a kind of punctuation, or a small moment in a cartoon
bubble above the head of the core character: the text. Fantastic
Prayers, as a performance, and now, as a CD-ROM, always treated sound as
an element equal to text and image, but in 1995 the web was not capable
of that equivalence.

ST: You've done live performances around the world and released several
CDs. How does working in a digital, networked space differ from
performing in a physical space or making recordings, and how do you
think about audience in this medium?

SV: I always start with thinking about context. For a long time, I
created soundtracks for experimental film and video. I began by thinking
about the images, as well as the intent of the artist and the sound that
might emphasize those ideas. When I began making site-specific sound
installations, I came to spaces as rooms in which to create soundtracks,
looking for existing sounds that would underline and amplify, or that
might change, a visitor's perception of space within that environment.
For example, I am interested in ways to make a space larger by sound.

My approach to working with the web is not that different. The Internet
becomes the space to amplify. In this project I wanted to dig up or
unearth specific sounds and then amplify them through the interactive
screen as well as through my compositions. Of course, I had to be aware
of file sizes, keeping the pieces short so that visitors would not need
to wait too long for the download. I also realize that people's patience
in relation to a computer is much shorter than, for example, in front
of their stereo or in a concert. It seemed clear that the pieces should
be kept relatively brief: were these compositions meant for CD release,
they would no doubt be longer and evolve more gradually. Creating works
to be heard on the web also encourages a conservative use of high and
low frequencies. Most people's computers are not able to render sound
with a quality equal to that of the home stereo; they remain typically
better equipped for higher quality with imagery than with sound.

ST: How did you approach the compositions? And on a continuum from
abstraction to representation, where would you locate these pieces?

This quartet of works utilize sounds that were found on the designated
sites as a basic palette from which to begin. The combinations of sounds
are not dictated by logic, rather they are based on impression and on
pleasing combinations. The results may be experienced as abstract, but
in my head as I created them each one had its own narrative and its own
vocabulary. I find myself attaching names to certain sounds that may not
have anything to do with their true origins, but come from the feeling I
get from listening to them. I consider these purely personal
associations and I don't expect anyone else to pick up on my narratives,
but it helps when organizing sounds while imagining how to present an
evocative experience, one that might be as rich in associations as any
visual counterpart. For example, when creating Air I imagined the sounds
as if heard from an insect riding on the back of a larger bird as it
flies over a dark countryside. You hear close-up scratches and movements
of wind and dust bouncing off the bird's wings, as well as long-shot
ambient clusters of sounds from the ground below. With Earth, I pictured
a slow moving animal or insect that moves along the dirt at night, half
submerged, listening from the ground, experiencing the bass rumble from
unseen events. A short piece for a slow loris' Walkman.

"Truth" in relation to sound is even more subjectively determined than
with visual imagery. In creating soundtracks, or sound environments, it
is often more important to present the idea of the thing than an actual
recording. Foley artists have long known that you do not need
documentation of one hundred horses running to give the viewer the
sensation of a hundred horses running by. A true recording might seem
muddy or too dense or unreadable, whereas a few people clapping their
hands knocking coconuts or slippers together into a microphone might
give a more persuasive and hence "truer" experience of horses running.

ST: The images used in the interactive screen were all taken from your
photographs. What is the relationship between the sound and image here,
and what prompted you to make your own, rather than work collaboratively
with a visual artist as you have in the past?

SV: For twelve years I worked with visual artists creating soundtracks
for their films, videos or installations. It wasn't until I started to
create exclusively sound works that I could see myself as an artist in
my own right, rather than as an artistic collaborator. I learned a great
deal from collaborations but it was important to start to define the
landscape myself rather than simply respond to other peoples'
frameworks. In the last year I have started to create visual responses
to my sound pieces. These have taken the form of video, installation,
and now, photography. I shot the photos for this project in Ouro Preto,
Brazil, where I was teaching a workshop in sound and image production.
While there I also spent time making field recordings relating to the
four elements.

When recording audio I would sometimes stop to take photographs. Several
of the photos were shot at night, standing alone in darkness. While
listening to something I would shoot with a digital still camera,
catching whatever the flash managed to find. The combination of chance
with knowing that something is there that I cannot see but might feel
and can still capture is another way to imagine the presence of the
ether.

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Notes:

1. A stupa is a dome-shaped monument used to house Buddhist relics or to
commemorate significant facts of Buddhism or Jainism. The graphical
representation of a Tibetan stupa used for this project came from
Dictionary of Symbols, (Malm