Installations — Marc Vilanova

Grounded Frictions. 2025

Solo Show

Speakers, fiber optics, lasers, glass, steel, string, custom software.

On view at Mattress Factory until May 10, 2026

Marc Vilanova approaches listening as an embodied practice. Rather than composing with sound, his work examines how frequencies at the edges of perception shape our cognitive and sensory systems. In Grounded Frictions, Vilanova extends this inquiry through three site-specific sculptural installations that explore the interplay of sensing, environment, and technology.

The works emerge from an exploration of signals deep within the Earth. Vilanova focuses on infrasounds: vibrations between 0.1 and 20 Hz that fall below the threshold of human hearing but are fundamental for planetary and biological processes. Using geophones, scientific instruments that detect these low frequencies in the earth, he recorded underground tremors near active gas wells in Western Pennsylvania, where extraction processes fracture bedrock and destabilize geological formations. In Grounded Frictions these low-frequency signals materialize through movement, light, and mechanical interaction.

In a darkened gallery, an array of fiber optic strings stretches from floor to ceiling, each anchored to a speaker. Unable to produce audible tones, the threads tighten, oscillate, and quiver in response to the underground recordings. Light flickers and dims as it traces a choreography of tension and release. We are invited to walk around or sit within the space to experience vibrational forces across elusive temporal and perceptual scales.

Attuning to these subterranean soundscapes fosters environmental awareness. Infrasounds signal seismic shifts and shape the behavior of organisms. Yet, industrial-induced vibrations disrupt Earth’s acoustic ecology, unsettling the environments that nonhuman animals, plants, and machinic systems sense and rely on.

In the adjoining room, two sculptures trace these recordings through materials shaped by Pittsburgh’s industrial past. A suspended array of undulating, textured glass tubes functions as a device for hearing these vibrations. Nearby, a curved, rolled steel structure forms a listening chamber. Agitated fibers brush against its worn metal surface in shifting patterns. A trembling soundscape builds, and its echoes stretch into the surrounding space.

Rather than resolving the limits of perception, Grounded Frictions unsettles them. These earthly vibrations may be felt before they become intelligible. Here, listening is not confined to the auditory but becomes a process of planetary attunement—an encounter with infrasounds as kinetic force, luminous translations, and traces in matter. Vilanova foregrounds the ways technologies, both in art and science, expand and mediate our perception into domains out of reach. Through bodily experience, the exhibition invites reflection on the generative potential where disciplines, knowledge systems, and modes of sensing converge. Within these frictions, a more-than-human sensorium takes form.

Text by Ana Prendes