Old noise, new sounds: sonic explorations in gallery spaces

Leon Narbey's electronic sound and light installation Real Time opened . New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in February 1970. It was a noisy exhibition. Fluorescent and neon lights constructed flickering visual spaces, swathes of black polythene disguised all internal architecture, and recording microphones and movement triggers transferred sounds from one space to another. It was simultaneously disorientating and exhilarating. Real Time was a major installation in a minor location. Outside the centres of an already. peripheral country, Real Time raised the possibility of networked electronic installation transgressing the mainstreams of both "gallery art and media art." It did this by using feedback and the relations of signal to noise to bring sound and image together in an interactive environment.