Senn and the Art of Acoustic Sculpture
- MyRoad, March 5, 2001

According to Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, music is "the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity," while sculpture is "the action or art of processing (as by carving, modeling, or welding) plastic or hard materials into works of art." In other words, music has to do with the faculty of hearing and the passage of time, sculpture with the faculty of sight and with the perception of three-dimensional space. However, musician and visual artist Dan Senn troubles this dichotomy as he combines sculpture, video, sound, and the spoken word to create complex works of art that engage time and space in order to explore subjects that range from memory to technology.

One of his best-known works (which has undergone several incarnations) is a multimedia celebration of a limestone cave in Minnesota that served as a dance hall called Catacombs of Yucatan in the 1930s. The first incarnation of the work took place in 1995 at the cave itself, where Senn brought together art-world types and local farmers to participate in a carefully choreographed visit to the cave, complete with sound, sculpture, and lighting installations. Composer and sound artist David Means observes that Senn's willingness to cross boundaries between art forms, types of audience, and high and low technology in this work not only helps prove that experimental art need not be elitist, but also demonstrates that technology can be used to create specific, individualized art experiences.

In a later performance version of Catacombs of Yucatan, Senn combined digitally altered video clips of interviews with people who remembered the dance hall and of the present site with a soundtrack composed of scratchy old recordings of dance tunes, spoken words (from the interviews), and a variety of electronic and manually produced sounds. Some of these sounds came from instruments invented by Senn himself, which he calls pendulyres. Like Senn's other instruments, which include shmoos, flutter harps, and tooned pendulings, the pendulyres incorporate electronic elements, such as microphone pickups and audio cables, with PVC piping, fishing line, and pine dowels. A cross between a skeletal harpsichord and an Alexander Calder mobile, these delicate objects defy any effort to categorize them either as sculpture or musical instrument. As part of a larger performance or installation, they both constitute and generate the work of art.

Senn has always been engaged with the relationship between traditional forms of art making and technology. As far back as 1978, he began to develop a software application for music composition based on the Zen aesthetics of Japanese raku pottery. A more recent project, Still Moving: Four Sides of a Japanese Language School coordinates the rotation of 1,130 video stills of the exterior of an abandoned building with a percussion score written for a specially prepared violin. The violinist drums her fingers on the body of the violin, pulls nylon strings attached to the violin's strings, and makes low spoken sounds. Senn's Vertical Penduling, a large-scale, permanent installation at the University of Washington's new Tacoma campus, seems to recall the traditional bell towers of older universities at the same time it incorporates digital technology. The piece, again both sculpture and instrument, involves a series of hand-made metal cones struck by bars suspended on lines that vibrate according to inaudible sound waves emitted by a CD player activated by visitors.

So what is Dan Senn? Is he a sculptor? A musician? A composer? A computer programmer? An inventor? Perhaps the real importance of his art lies in its ability to incorporate all these categories and at the same time draw them into question.

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photo credit: Denise Senn