BELL TOWER - LAZY EYE GALLERY - 2025

Cast from bronze and polylactic acid, Bell Tower is an immersive sound vigil that reconsiders what it means to listen to the desert. Though often seen as barren, our landscapes are alive with quiet resonance — Ober’s work gives voice to these subtle, living frequencies.

"In the aftermath of weeks of sporadic, torrential rains, the dirt roads leading to Lazy Eye Gallery had collapsed into a chain of dark pools, the Mojave dissolving into mud, treacherous and unstable. Approaching the former water tower that now houses the gallery, a low, sanguine glow pulsed from within. Inside, the space is just wide enough for one viewer, its improbable height offering the only reprieve from the compression of timeworn plywood and exposed structural steel. Ober answers this constraint with a canopy of bells, each derived from the same mathematical curve yet cast or printed in divergent sizes and materials.

They bloom downward like metallic and resinous flowers, an aerial biome of attenuated instruments. Some hold faint amber glows, others the patinated surfaces of cast bronze. Small speakers nest in their throats; still others shelter delicate striker mechanisms triggered by signals moving through a lattice of wires. A plexiglass module bearing fifty-two miniature amplifiers anchors the system, its cables spilling outward and rising again to meet the hanging assembly. Columns of tiny red LEDs flare like a synthetic spine, as though the tower had evolved its own nervous system.

The sounds coursing through the installation draw from the land itself: field recordings of birds and insects, sensors wired through meat thermometers relaying the irregular murmurs of a compost heap, and a thousand lines of code pulsing through the bells like semi-lucid automatic writing. Their archaic tintinnabulation recalls David Tudor’s Rainforest, yet here the resonance feels metabolic, as if one had stepped into a hidden ecology running low-frequency subroutines. Moisture, microbes, mineral gradients, and root-fine signals form a computational substrate, the desert executing its own slow, subterranean logic.

Mounted in the corner is a small, severe plaque: “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.” With its Dust Bowl origins and current cultural resurgence intact, the phrase enters Ober’s circuitry to read less as protest than as a principle of system dynamics. Hierarchies advance toward stasis, then erode from within as energy leaches downward. Regimes in retrograde enter terminal drift, persisting as hollow architectures long after their animating forces have collapsed. In the cold continuity of physics, entropy prevails, shifting matter and meaning alike into histories dustbin. Ober renders this not as metaphor but as demonstration, the tower’s overhead array revealing a world already reorganizing itself beneath our feet. The soil cries out for an encore." 

- Jed Ochmanek - https://www.jedochmanek.com/