Sabisha Friedberg: The Starry Garter: A Certain Point Within A Sphere

For her Spring 2011 Audio Art Residency at the Clocktower Gallery, audio artist and composer Sabisha Friedberg created The Starry Garter: A Certain Point Within A Sphere, a radio adaptation of the 19th century Hermetic tale Etidorhpa, or, the end of the earth: the strange history of a mysterious being and the account of a remarkable journey. Published in 1895, Etidorhpa tells the tale of an unknown man’s journey to the center of the earth, divulging arcane secrets in a process of initiation, and revealing a journey to an ethereal plane of non-material existence. Friedberg’s The Starry Garter: A Certain Point Within A Sphere is a sonic prose-poem for the radio, drawing on the fantastical Victorian novel’s text and spiritual and scientific explorations as an inspiration for original soundscapes. Friedberg is known for investigating the tactile and aleatory qualities of analog material and antiquated technologies. For this project, she combined an electro-acoustic approach with an application of granular synthesis to create specific auditive forms, adapting the 19th century Hermetic tale into an aural soundscape, illustrating the chapters with dialogue and musical interludes, and creating the environment of the piece with textures and effects generated by vintage foley work. ----