3000000Hz is an artist’s book informed by Olympia Scarry’s solo-exhibition White Noise at Fondazione ICA Milano in 2022, depicting, frame-by-frame, a series of ultrasound scans of white onyx recorded at the Policlinico of Milan.
Words by artist Olympia Scarry:
A record of an archeo echo. 3 million Hertz per second, 5 minutes, and 7 billion years in 2023. Ultrasonic frequencies of sound waves, pulsating off the surface of a solid rock of translucent white onyx, submerged in water, sunken again below the sea, recomposing the potential and spatial distances by returning to a deep time, as the membrane of a body. Sound becomes visible as the abstracted, yet anthropomorphic frames translate the traces into a soundtrack of stratigraphic depths. A fluorescent yellow light pierces a fissure, oscillating a horizontal plane as the measure of tempo. The echo’s record of the sublime geological landscape rotating on its own axis, is suspended in time, collapsing the memory of the material, but only for a nanosecond. Sound travels faster underwater.
3000000Hz was conceived by the artist, designed by Dan Solbach and produced by Apalazzo Gallery and Fondazione ICA Milano. The text is set in Persona (Abyme, 2022).
