



Client: Town of Los Gatos
Location: Los Gatos Library, USA
Completion date: 2012
Artwork budget: $118,000
Project Team
Artist
sheri simons
Architect
Christopher Noll and Abraham Jayson
Noll and Tam Architects
Industry Resource
Dorothy Lenehan
Lenehan Architectural Glass
Interior Designer
Dennis Coleman
Overview
2012
Pencil drawings translated and sandblasted into half-inch, low iron glass. Hand colored.
The surface of Voice-over is incised with many graphical languages that speak over each other, interrupt, and converse within the quiet of the library. The glass can be “read” simultaneously as aural and visual, leaving open the possibility of multidirectional reading that can start or end at any point along the planes. The ability to understand the writing as a logical text is secondary to sensing the rhythm of written language.
The graphical languages of Voice-over include:
Braille,
handwriting samples,
the Naxi written language,
schematic for connecting a washing machine,
George Crumb’s music score Makrokosmos,
magnified, shrunken, and otherwise distorted automatic writing by the artist,
the first paragraph from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
composer/inventor Trimpin’s scores for Picnics, Rhythms and Vacations and Conlonpurple,
seven words with thirty-three letters by Brad Thiele,
chart to depict the thermal conductivity of tungsten,
part of the Persian word for whole,
Frei Otto’s diagram to illustrate stresses in membranes,
Stokes’ Theorem,
diagram of a fly cleaning itself while on an overhead projector’s projection stage,
phonetic spelling of the words speech sounds,
two covering maps.