The translation of the physicality of a concrete construction block into a sound expression.

North of a Solid Ground began with a discarded concrete construction block found in Canberra: an ordinary fragment of urban infrastructure, half-sunk in weeds and easily absorbed into the visual field of the roadside. In this work, that object enters a different operational register. Photogrammetry was used to construct a 3D model of the block, translating its form into digital data through a process that stabilises and regularises its appearance. This process draws the block into a system of representation that extends the same coherence and legibility concrete infrastructure projects into the world.

The digital model was then subjected to the process of databending: the 3D mesh data was imported into audio software and re-exported as raw sound, producing a jagged waveform of spikes, oscillations, and bursts of noise. Through this cross-protocol translation, the concrete block becomes a dynamic signal event. Its presence shifts from mass and volume to turbulence, interference, and distortion. The work moves the block through a procedural transformation that brings its material force into contact with the unstable conditions of electronic transmission.

This transformation is presented through a Tektronix 760A stereo audio monitor, which displays the databent sound as a live flickering trace. The monitor retains its character as a diagnostic instrument while the signal activates it as an image-making apparatus. In this process, a mundane fragment of concrete infrastructure is recast as a volatile infrastructural image, bringing forward the procedures of calibration, measurement, and control that organise concrete’s authority. North of a Solid Ground occupies an intermediate ground between material object and electronic abstraction, where concrete appears as signal, waveform, and luminous event.

Listen to North of a Solid Ground A Side and B Side.