Suspension Blues (ANTS AG28) probably needs to be experienced as an audio-visual installation, which is how the creators John Krausbauer and Kaori Suzuki conceived it, but for those of us who couldn’t make it to an art gallery in 2020 we have today’s record of the audio element lasting for 49 mins. There’s also a printed booklet of squares printed in various shades of blue.
The artists wanted the audience to walk into a “strobosphere”, where the visual and audio elements would be aligned together in a “direct relation”. The strobed projections of geometrically-perfect blue shapes are synched directly to synthesiser patches, processed in real time by computer software. Some of the keywords for the total experience are “hypnotic”, “deep listening”, and “trance”; the creators refer to methods borrowing from structuralism, minimalism, and mathematics, the better to help them realise this ingenious time-based artwork.
American creator Krausbauer has been here before with his pared-down minimalist sound-art statements, such as Beats, Paralleled, and Spectre Of Radiants, usually typified by their extreme long-form and very sparing use of instruments or sound sources. Japanese lady Kaori Suzuki is a new name to me, but she has made artworks informed by a deep understanding of the sense of hearing and associated aural artefacts, such as “third ear tone psychedelia”. (06/02/2025)